Rosie Jones: The Disabled Comedian Redrawing Global Borders One Filthy Joke at a Time

Rosie Jones, the British comedian who also happens to have cerebral palsy, has been touring her latest hour “Delicious” from Adelaide to Zurich, proving that the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals can apparently be achieved one dick joke at a time. While diplomats in Geneva continue drafting strongly worded communiqués about inclusion, Jones is out there actually practicing it—charging full ticket price, no pity discount, and still outselling most ambassadors’ Twitter follower counts. The world keeps wondering how to export democracy; perhaps we should start by exporting her rider.

From an international standpoint, Jones is a walking—well, occasionally wheeling—reminder that the global north’s obsession with “awareness” campaigns is about as useful as a chocolate teapot. You can’t swing a sustainably sourced tote bag without hitting a corporation that’s slapped a rainbow or wheelchair icon on its logo, yet when was the last time Unilever sponsored a disabled woman to tell jokes about shagging in disabled toilets? Jones’s passport is filling up faster than a Kremlin ballot box, and every border guard who asks, “Will your chair fit in the scanner?” is treated to a masterclass in British sarcasm that NATO should frankly weaponise.

The broader significance, dear reader, is that Rosie has become a low-key geopolitical event. When she sold out the Sydney Opera House, Australia’s tourism board suddenly remembered disabled visitors existed—just in time for them to realise their trams still have stairs. In Singapore, her gig coincided with a government pledge to improve “accessibility”; officials called it coincidence, everyone else called it panic. Even the EU, normally busy drafting 400-page accessibility directives nobody reads, tweeted a clip of her routine. Nothing greases legislative wheels like the fear a comedian might call you out in front of 2.4 million TikTok followers.

Meanwhile, the global streaming giants—Netflix, Amazon, that other one named after a South American river—are locked in a bidding war for her special that makes the scramble for Ukrainian grain look polite. Algorithms have discovered that audiences will binge anything if the punchlines are sharp enough; turns out disability is marketable when it’s attached to someone who refuses to be inspirational wallpaper. Who knew? Wall Street, probably. Shares in closed-captioning companies jumped three percent the week Jones announced her tour dates. Somewhere, a hedge-fund bro is adding “laughter equity” to his portfolio between cocaine lines.

Human nature, ever predictable, responds to Rosie the way it responds to any uncomfortable truth: half the audience laughs, the other half checks their phone to see if cancel culture has a hotline. The real twist is that Jones weaponises both reactions. She knows you’re worried you’ll laugh at the “wrong” thing, so she steers straight into the skid, reminding us that comedy’s job isn’t to make the world safe but to make it honest. By the time she’s done, the international consensus on disability has shifted from “thoughts and prayers” to “two-drink minimum.” Progress comes in strange denominations.

In the grand bazaar of global culture, Rosie Jones is the stall nobody expected to set up, selling contraband empathy laced with arsenic wit. She has become a de facto soft-power export, cheaper than aircraft carriers and twice as effective. Foreign ministries could learn a thing or two: next time you want to win hearts and minds, skip the jazz quartet at the embassy reception and hire a disabled woman to explain why airline peanuts are still impossible to open one-handed.

And so we reach the inevitable conclusion: Rosie Jones’s tour will end, the headlines will fade, and some bureaucrat will file a report titled “Lessons Learned.” The report will gather digital dust on a server powered by coal and regret. But somewhere in a comedy club in Lagos or Lima, a kid with a limp will watch a pirated clip and think, “I could do that.” If that isn’t international development, I don’t know what is. Meanwhile, the rest of us can return to pretending the world is improving—just slower than Rosie’s punchlines, and with far less applause.