Arianna Rotty

Journal Entry #2

January 29, 2020

First and foremost, I want to point out that I was not in attendance to our class on Wednesday that our

guest speaker Jake was speaking at so to be able to talk about my reactions toward his speech would be useless

and not based in factual evidence. I was told that we were watching and talking about certain videos in which

individuals with disabilities took part in comedy shows. These individuals were people who have some sort of

disability and the topic of this journal was how we felt about that. While I did not see the video that was

referenced for this journal entry, I have seen many comedy shows and television shows which certain

individuals with disabilities have been featured on or took part in the television show, such as The Price Is Right

or Americas Got Talent. With large venues for audiences and places were ideas and thoughts can run rampant,

small minded people become the forefront of the “hive mind” that typically come with large crowds. I have

seen TV shows where the contestants with the physical disability were treated differently and the whole feeling

of the show was changed because it became about the “braveness” of the person with a disability instead of

them simply being a person on the TV show. Another instance where a person with a disability was treated

differently during a TV programming was during the 2019 Tony Awards. During this award ceremony for the

top billed Plays and Musicals of the year, an actress by the name of Allie Stocker was nominated for best

supporting actress in a musical. The one thing that should be mentioned, though, should be that Ms. Stocker is

in a wheel chair and the theatre in which the awards show was set in was not wheelchair accessible. Stocker has

to remain backstage instead of in the audience because if she were to win, her wheel chair would not have been

able to get on the stage from the audience side. So, even if she had not won, she would have still remained in

the wings of the stage, singled out and disappointed.