There’s nothing really funny about a disability. Yet sometimes the humor can be used in a right way. I’ll admit, I laugh every time Amy Poehler screams obscenities in Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo with as the joke is how other people are uncomfortable about it.
For the most part, our society has never really learned how to deal with people with physical disabilities. We tried to change the terminology so that handicapped people are “handicapable” which isn’t really a word. And the word “retarded” has gone on to be a bad word even though it means something has been used for a very long time to described anything that has become slowed in the progress. Yes, it’s wrong to use it to refer to people with developmental disabilities.
But that’s the way it was for a long time. The same can be said for the N-word which was used in for so long in normal conversation it turned Adventures of Huckleberry Finn into a controversial subject as the book is written in dialect and it appears 219 times. Ergo, even though the titular character isn’t a racist, he uses it all the times.
The N-word was blurted out by John Davidson at the British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA) on Feb. 22. Davidson is the subject of the biopic I Swear, which is about his life. Davidson said the racial slur when Michael B. Jackson and Delroy Lindo appeared on stage. Both men are black. Host Alan Cummings apologized on Davidson’s behalf as Davidson has suffered from Tourette’s Syndrome most of his life. But some people didn’t think it was an accident.
Jamie Foxx and Wendell Pierce condemned it. And they had good reason to criticize the incident and the way people tried to excuse it. Davidson grew up in Scotland in the 1970s and 1980s. The country has only about 1 percent of the population who are considered black. I’m sure he was exposed to that word and a lot of other colorful language. I grew up in the South and people still said it all the time in the 1990s as if it was punctuation.
When you’re exposed to certain language, it’s going to be in your manner of speech. People in the say say “Coke.” People in New England and the upper Mid-West say, “Soda.” And people in the southwest differientiate betweel “Soda” and “Pop.” Accents are based on regional dialect. I didn’t realize how bad it was until I went to college and realized people from the metro-Atlanta suburbs talked differently than those from the sticks. And now, after living half my life near Tulsa, it’s a lot easier to see the differences in language, dialect, accents and word usage.
I’m sure Davidson was nervous as the movie I Swear was up for nomination. I’ve known two people with Tourette’s. Neither one of them ever swore a lot. One was a guy I knew in college who would act like he was swiping away a fly or mosquito near his ear. And every now and again, he would just say, “Boo.” But he would scream it. It would just come out and we all learned not to react confused when we saw him exhibit symptoms.
The other guy is a family member who would do twitches with his eyes and wiggle his nose like he had allergies. The myth that people constantly swear and use racial slurs when they have Tourette’s has been used by the entertainment industry as a joke. Less than 1 percent of the world’s population is diagnosed with Tourette’s. And of that, only about 10 to 20 percent suffer from coprolalia which is the condition of involuntarily screaming obscenities.
There was an L.A. Law episode back in the late 1980s where a character had it and he would scream obscenities and say “Oh, boy! Oh, boy!” whenever he got nervous or upset. This was later used by Paul Fusco during an outtake while filming the sitcom Alf. Video of it made the rounds on the Internet about a decade ago.
Over the weekend, the cast and writers of Saturday Night Live did a skit where they impersonated celebrities (Mel Gibson, J.K. Rowling and Lous C.K.) who have said offensive, bigoted and racial comments. These celebs were trying to say their past comments were really caused by Tourette’s. Roseanne Barr blamed her racial comments back in 2017 as the result of Ambien. Other celebs impersonated are Armie Hammer who blames Tourette’s on his cannibalistic comments in online chats and Kenan Tompson as Bill Cosby who tries to dismiss putting sedatives in drinks so he can sexually assault women also on the condition.
Some people didn’t find it too funny thinking it was mocking people with disabilities. But I agree with others that it’s mocking celebrities who say offensive and bigoted things in public and then walk it back to blame it on their medication or medical conditions. None of the celebrities being mocked have Tourette’s so it’s punching up at people who have big heads and think they’re invincible until there’s backlash.
When Trump mocked journalist Serge Kovaleski, he was making fun of the man’s physical disabilities. It’s the same way leprosy has been used as presenting people as freaks in movies and on TV. Neither one is funny. It’s cruel and ableist.
Zane Says 