Magda Romanska, ‘Disability in Tragic and Comic Frame’ (2015)

The connection between humor and disability is perhaps one of the most challenging, and
underresearched, aspects of comic theory. Modern theorists of humor and comedy generally
pursue two lines of inquiry: along one they analyze how, historically, humor at the expense of
the disabled has created and reestablished discriminatory and alien-
ating comic conventions (these critics also argue about whether we’ve experienced the
emergence of a taboo on such humor—or the continued lack of such a taboo); along the other
line of inquiry theorists investigate different comic strategies used by the disabled to avert
and displace comic insults (including black humor, ironic detachment, and self-deprecation).
Disability and humor studies share a number of salient critical points, among them a focus on
incongruity theory, which traces the source of humor to disjunction between normative and
non-normative appearances and behaviors. We can even argue that it is, in fact, the comic
frame that has structured the very experience of disability across the world.

In the historical context of disability (as a socially constructed category connected to but not
convergent with impairment—like gender and sex, for example), the very foundation of comic
theory (as established by Plato and Aristotle) involves positioning oneself ethically and
aesthetically towards the disabled. Plato makes an argument that the comic impulse is
fundamentally a flaw of character because it involves laughing at others’ misfortune. In turn,
Aristotle argues that comedy should in fact mock “a species of the ugly.” These two
approaches to comedy, Plato’s and Aristotle’s, set up a theoretical framework that continues
to be at the crux of humor and disability studies: how is it appropriate or not appropriate to
laugh at disability (or, for that matter, any non-normative body and behavior), and at whom
or what?

Existentially, disability is simultaneously an extremely alien experience to the non-disabled

and an extremely familiar experience of the body-in-waiting (every-one’s body will eventually

fall apart, and disability oſten functions as both a reminder of that fact and a certain relief at

a not-yet-reached future). Thus, most historical and contemporary tragic narratives dealing
with disability revolve around two extreme notions: on one hand, the disabled character is an

“inspirational” figure (oſten sacrificed in melodramatic plots of suffering and redemption); on

the other, he or she is an embodiment of “evil” (as defined by Freud’s [‘Some character-types
met with in psycho-analytic work’, 1916] analysis of Shakespeare’s Richard III as an archetypal
model of the disabled who exhibits, according to Freud, an “obvious” correlation between
physical disability and “deformities of character”). The two extreme tragic narratives are
translated into comic formulas through two strategies: (1) the disabled character—though the
comic trope of self-deprecation—somehow manages to acquire the status of the “human”
(and, thus, is no longer an alien object of mockery but in some way is “in on the joke” with the
audience. He becomes, alternatively, inspiring and endearing); (2) the disabled character’s
“evil” impulses are so farfetched that they become grotesque: his ambitions are at once
unrealistic and delusional (he becomes alternatively more and less than human, super
threatening and super weak). These two comic formulas have persisted more or less
unchanged, and they have remained mostly uncontested in both theoretical and comic
writings and performance.

Starting in antiquity, it was quite common and appropriate to laugh at the disabled. As a result,

throughout the centuries, more oſten than not, they would perform either in circuses or as

court jesters. In medieval and Renaissance Europe, in fact, dwarf jesters were so popular that
the practice of kidnapping and artifi-cially stunting children became common to keep up with
demand. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600), Lysander insults Hermia by
calling her an artificially, “knot-grass made” dwarf: “Get you gone, you dwarf; / You minimus,
of hindering knot-grass made; / You bead, you accord!” The desire to keep dwarfs and other
“freaks” at court was almost universally viewed as a way to contain their magical capacity for
evil. It was also believed that the touch of a dwarf could cure and fend off illness, and his
stinging wit could “purge ill humour.” Some court jesters were developmentally challenged,
with Down syndrome, Asperger, or autism, and they too were used for amusement, as their
antics were considered a great source of entertainment.

Although some court jesters were killed in revenge for their biting humor; many others,
ironically, found shelter in the safety of the court. The body of the disabled court jester, his
ambivalent—if also precarious—position as both a prized possession and the object of
ridicule, illustrates well the uneasy connection between disability and the tragic and comic
frames. Paradoxically, disability can embody both of them simultaneously, depending on our
degree of identification with the object. As Trissino (1529) aptly put it: “if we have like
sufferings, the sight of them in others does not move us to laughter.” If the wounds and
suffering are “deadly and painful […] they do not move laughter, but rather pity through fear
that similar ills may come to ourselves.” The disabled body can at once be an object of
mockery and object of pity. This paradoxical position of the disabled body as both tragic and
comic is intimately intertwined in our sense of human dignity, both as a narrative trope (the
way its loss functions in Arthur Miller’s definition of modern tragedy, and the way its loss
functions in Aristotle’s definition of comedy) and as the essential precondition to humanist
ethics.

In his famous essay “Tragedy and the Common Man” (1949), Arthur Miller modifies the
Aristotelian definition of tragedy (as based on a “tragic flaw”) and argues that “the tragic
feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down
his life, if need be, to secure one thing—his sense of personal dignity.” Tragedy then, Miller
writes “automatically demonstrates the indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity.”
The concept of human dignity, like the concept of “humanity,” can be considered a historical
and exclusionary concept that defines an exclusionary category (since not everyone is
automatically granted the status of ‘human’). The disabled characters and their narrative
journeys towards humanity and human dignity (e.g., Elephant Man narratives) are at the core
of Miller’s understanding of tragedy. Their narrative journeys are very much rooted in this
narrative model of a quest towards human dignity. In tragic narratives, this quest succeeds
(through the pathos of suffering, sacrifice and self-sacrifice, and eventual redemption). In
comic narratives, this quest can either fail or succeed. It succeeds in inspirational, “heroic”
narratives that employ humor to make the quest and heroism of the character more palpable
for non-disabled audience members. However, it fails in grotesque and farcical narratives
where the disabled character is either demonically “evil” or a surreal fantasy creature (outside
of the category of “human”).

Like all other marginalized groups, the disabled have also found recourse in humor as a coping
strategy. Since most of that type of coping humor involves some form of self-deprecation, like
other critics the theorists of disability and humor studies have wondered whether such humor
indeed has liberatory potential or whether it reinforces and codifies the marginalization of
non-normative bodies. In her book on Jewish humor, Ruth R. Wisse (2013) asks whether Jews
can ever “overdose” on the self-deprecating humor: can a group of people who have been
threatened with violence and extinction time and time again really afford to perpetuate the
kind of humor that further self-marginalizes them? In a similar vein, the theorists of African
American humor have wondered to what degree the self-deprecating humor “engendered by
the slavery experience and codified during the relatively extended and popular run of
blackface entertainment endured” backfired on the African American community by
confirming and perpetuating some of the worst stereotypes of the era (Watkins 39). Today’s

self-deprecating Jewish, African American, or feminist humor oſten involves the element of

meta-irony, and critics continue to argue about how effective such comic strategies are. Some
disabled stand-up (or stand-down) comics, like Stella Young or Maysoon Zayid used the
reversed gaze humor as a way to reframe the narrative language around their disabilities.

Like with every other marginalized group, the humor of the disabled has an inside and an

outside audience. The humor directed at the outside audience is oſten performed at the

expense of the marginalized group (with awareness of that group’s marginal status and its
relationship to the mainstream audience). The inside humor, on the other hand, returns a

comic gaze, oſten poking fun not so much at the marginal group but at the mainstream that

marginalizes it. In one of her 1950s interviews, Lorraine Hansberry noted that “The intimacy
of knowledge which the Negro may culturally have of white Americans does not exist in the
reverse.” The rights of the disabled lag significantly behind those of every other minority
group, and Hansberry’s statement captures well the current state of the relationship between
the disabled and non-disabled groups: the intimacy of knowledge that the disabled have of
the non-disabled community does not exist in the reverse. Susan Wendell (1997) noted that
“if disabled people were truly heard, an explosion of knowledge of the human body and
psyche would take place” (274). Perhaps the same can also be said of our humor?