But once she did, she couldn't stop seeing their sharp, sometimes biting edges in most of what she did.
That approach lives at the center of her new live comedy show, "Stand Up With Crystal Emery," launching this Saturday at Bregamos Community Theater in Fair Haven. Inspired by her belief in storytelling and lived experience as a Black disabled woman, the show offers a new sharp-tongued, truth-to-power kind of comedy, with the belief that laughter can be a balm and a teacher.
The title is also meant to be cheeky and ironic: Emery, who has Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, is a quadriplegic and has been in a wheelchair since 2002. She’s doing stand up comedy, sitting down. Tickets and more information are available here.
"I've had enough experiences for 20 people," she said on a recent episode of WNHH Community Radio's "Arts Respond." "And I write down some of them. Like, some things have been so terrible that in writing them, there was always a funny moment."
In many ways, it's a surprise—including to her—that the show is happening at all. An activist, artist, filmmaker and public health advocate (Emery founded and ran URU, The Right To Be through last year), Emery loves a good laugh, but doesn't particularly like comedians (Dave Chappelle, D.L. Hughley, and Michelle Buteau may be her only exceptions).
It's not personal, she said: she just doesn't find them especially funny. Her reaction to most shows "is like, ick! Oh my God, this is terrible!" she said.
But a few months ago, she began working alongside a young man who was a comedy enthusiast ("I mean, he loves comedy," she stressed). As the two got to know each other, he convinced her to come along to a couple of comedy performances, all of which left her nonplussed. And then last year, around the holidays, she bought him tickets to see Michelle Buteau in New York City.
In January, the two headed into Brooklyn, excited to see what Buteau had in store. Emery surprised herself: when Buteau asked the audience for participation, Emery had her fellow attendee to raise his hand on her behalf. "I want to do stand up," she told Buteau. "But I can't stand up."
Buteau told Emery to return the next day. Something she'd seen, she said, told her that Emery was a natural comedian. And when she came back, Buteau gave her five minutes to perform. "And the rest was history," Emery said.
So when Emery started thinking of material, she reached back to her experience as a storyteller, writing down some of her memories. There was the story, for instance, of a nurse during her recent stay in rehab, who ostensibly dropped a baggie of cocaine in her room. Already, recovery had been an ordeal: the facility didn't have the right equipment to change her wounds. Her medical aide was concerned about leaving her there.
And then there was what appeared to be cocaine on the floor. Emery, sufficiently "freaked out," had her brother pick her up the next morning. But when she turned to law enforcement to lodge a complaint, she found that police gave her the runaround. It took multiple phone calls to two different departments for anyone in law enforcement to take her seriously. She knew (or strongly suspected) it was because she was a Black woman in a wheelchair.
"You gotta take a negative like that, right, after you think about it, and try to find the humor in it," she said. "My humor was not about the nurse, but about the police station. Because the guy was like, 'I'm not taking a complaint from a disgruntled patient.' What the hell is a disgruntled patient?"
"I have, like, a weird sense of humor," she later added. "So I have to try it out on people. But what I do know how to do, and I do it well, is to tell a story. And I think that the humor is in the honesty of the story."
Her material also draws on her day-to-day experience as a disabled woman, from watching able-bodied actors play disabled characters to watching a room go silent or get skittish when she mentions sex. When Emery became wheelchair bound in the early 2000s, she saw how quick people were to judge. Her identities—wife, daughter, artist, Black woman—all became secondary to her chair in their eyes.
There wasn't anything inherently funny about those assumptions—except for when there was. It fits into Emery's brand of comedy, which addresses a system that was never built for her.
"The intersection of race and gender and disability is just f'd up," she said ."Because you never know which one is in action. The -ism vortex. And when that's working, you don't know what's going on. So I revert to the human vortex."
"When a non-disabled actors portrays a disabled person, they're labelled brave," she said. "When a disabled person represents a disabled person, does that mean I get an Oscar, right? Because that is the irony in our culture now."
As she prepares for opening night, she is both "freaking out" and trying to calm her nerves, she said. She's continued writing new material, excited to flex that muscle at Bregamos. She hopes that members of her audience will come into the space with a wide-open mind.
"I'm like, you know what? We got this," she said. "Comedy is not about perfection. It is actually about imperfection ... it allows the audience to laugh at something, but also gives them the opportunity to look at their own thoughts around that particular subject matter."
Listen to the WNHH Interview above. "Stand Up with Crystal Emery" is April 5 at 7 p.m. at Bregamos Community Theatre, 791 Blatchley Ave in Fair Haven. Tickets and more information are available here. The photo at the top, of Emery with Buteau, is from a flyer for the event.
Crystal Emery can't remember exactly when she began to find the laugh lines in her life. Maybe it was during a hospital stay, when a particularly chatty nurse led to a long and unexpected ordeal with Hamden law enforcement. Or a personal interest in film that led her to too many bad depictions of disabled people. Or a belief that she could change someone’s outlook, one giggle at a time.