I want to know
Offensive or hilarious?
Discuss.
Visual description: It's a four-and-a-half minute YouTube video of a MadTV skit where a well-dressed black couple approach an attractive white hostess inside a restaurant. It's not until they choose to sit on the patio (the conversation adds to the humor) that the camera draws back to reveal the wheelchair beside the hostess podium. The hostess struggles to get into the manual and rolls a couple yards to a stairway, which looms upward in the background. Flinging the menus she carries up the stairs ahead of her, she then drops out of the chair and precedes to drag herself and the chair halfway up the stairs while reciting the restaurant specials for the day. (Much arguing in dialogue here.) When the couple ask to see the manager, she starts dragging herself down the stairs to go get him. In a panic, the couple flee the restaurant. The hostess calls for another employee, Angelo, to report that "a couple ditched their reservation." Angelo is at the top of the stairs and uses wrist crutches. The comedy is visual as he struggles and lunges down the stairs and out the door after the couple while the hostess lays at the bottom of the stairs next to her wheelchair.
10 comments:
I thought that this was very funny, but perhaps as inside joke? My spouse thought it offensive, but he's always so worried about saying the right thing, doing the right thing around people with disabilities. He's even unsure of how to feel about my slang and jokes that refer to my own disability or to disability culture.
I thought it was very funny too, Jana, particularly because it's a nondisabled black couple fleeing because, as the man says, "We can't win." There's a lot there that could be unpacked about minority status and discrimination, but it's funny too. Maybe because there's so much going on.
Actually, I surprised myself by not thinking critically about the lack of access central to the whole joke until I'd watched the clip several times. I mean, I noticed, of course, but I thought that except for the people actually working in such an inaccessible place, what occurred was spot on.
I think it makes a point and was pretty perceptive in some ways. For example, zeroing in on the assistance without asking issue. I don't see just anyone as knowing that's an issue. I don't see the workers with disabilities being mocked so much as this woefully unaccessible building. They are portrayed competent folks foiled by their surroundings. I wonder who wrote this? What's the story of their insight?
DarrenH: All I know is that this is a MadTV skit. I suppose the actors are part of the show's cast and that one of them wrote the skit. I should watch more MadTV. I've always heard it was good.
John Callahan, the quafriplegic and cartoonist that wrote the autobiographical "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot" used to have a series of cartoons about the newly injured quad in hospital. In one, he's fallen out of bed and is laying next to it on the floor hollering at the appalled people gather round to help: "Don't touch me! I can do it myself!" There's some of that inside humor in this MadTV skit.
But I think it mostly plays on the fear of nondisabled people. "What to do? It's so awkward standing here just watching." Etc. And there's the subtle hints at the skits beginning that the disabled white woman was going to be racist which adds to the awkwardness and humor for me. She's not racist. Her objections to seating the couple on the patio are all about her!
I'll leave my typo "quafriplegic" there above, for humor's sake. Maybe Sara will come along and interpret what the new word means. ;)
Late to the party, I vote both funny and offensive. It's hilarious because the physical humor is hilarious. On the other hand, it's offensive the same way humor that makes women seem like incomprehensible freaks of nature that men can never hope to understand is offensive. In the real world, it takes far less complication than is depicted here to make the "normals" feel the way this couple feels when bolting out the door. And that is a frustrating truth for someone who is not "normal" of body yet wishes to lead an ordinary life without assumptions being made about her that will interfere with her happiness and self-determinism.
I actually cheered a little bit internally when our hostess smacked Mr. Customer on his rump for pushing her chair without asking. Shoot, I yell at my boyfriend for doing this very thing all the time -- usually, though, when I'm wheeling about our house carrying an armful of precarious things, like overfull dishes of hot food that the slightest unexpected jolt can topple onto the floor, and my lap. At the same time the portrayal of the restaurant as being a set-up of the disabled workers' own construction is a bad, unconstructive image in a world with restaurant owners like your buddy, Clint Eastwood.
Maybe I overthink things, but while I laughed at this, it also stung and made me angry.
Maybe I also have a different perspective on this as someone who worked at Whole Foods in the customer service department before and after having my leg cut off. I would have customers ask me where something was, and (though I argued against this strenuously when our store was remodeled) our policy was not to put numbers on the aisles and always to walk the customer -- whether our accompaniment was desired or not -- personally to the location of the item being sought in order to maximize sales potential with the appearance of maximizing service. When a customer would ask where something was, I would say, "Please allow me to show you," come out from behind my register with my funny walk (and if it was May through September, in shorts with my fake leg plainly visible) only to watch the customer's face morph from neutral to pitying in 0.5 seconds. And then the customer would always say, "Gee, I hate to make you walk." And then we would have to talk about my leg, and I would be forced -- again -- to explain that I'd only gotten a fake leg so I could walk, and that I'd worked very hard to be able to walk, and (semi-jokingly) the customer better not dare try to take it away from me. And then we would walk over to the margarine or whatever, and a lot of times I would actually have to slow my pace for the customer. And while we were walking we couldn't just talk about what a nice day it was, no, we'd have to talk about why I had a fake leg, whether I was over my cancer, how I wasn't really all that brave, how many worse things there are to go through besides amputation, etc. And I'd be in the position of deflecting all these projections just because most people aren't educated about how to think about or interact with disabled or even putatively disabled people or even just people who look "funny" -- whatever that might be, including different by virtue of ethnicity, or simply different from the beholder by virtue of something as basic as gender. So maybe this skit picks a scab of mine just a little bit.
As for "quafriplegic," gee, I'm stumped. ;) Maybe it's a four-limbed drinking disorder.
In the real world, it takes far less complication than is depicted here to make the "normals" feel the way this couple feels when bolting out the door.
Very true.
I actually cheered a little bit internally when our hostess smacked Mr. Customer on his rump for pushing her chair without asking.
Me too. And when Ms. Customer looks at her date as the disabled hostess questions why she no longer wants to go on the patio: "Why are you looking at him? Does he know why you changed your mind? I want to know!"
At the same time the portrayal of the restaurant as being a set-up of the disabled workers' own construction is a bad, unconstructive image in a world with restaurant owners like your buddy, Clint Eastwood.
Heh, why just the other day he invited me to dinner, but it turns out I couldn't get in the place.
And yes, the lack of access remains unchallenged in this particular skit, despite it's being a part of the comedy. I wouldn't be surprised if the average nondisabled viewer can watch this without once thinking "Damn, restaurants should be accessible!"
And I'd be in the position of deflecting all these projections just because most people aren't educated about how to think about or interact with disabled or even putatively disabled people or even just people who look "funny" -- whatever that might be, including different by virtue of ethnicity, or simply different from the beholder by virtue of something as basic as gender.
Yep. And you probably didn't mind the walk in the least, right? Just the topic of conversation?
As far as unsolicited help (back to that), I would bet that if all the daily casual public encounters where disabled people receive help from nondisabled people could somehow be quantified and categorized, easily 20 percent (maybe 50 percent) would involve help with tasks the disabled person could do themselves, but that the social awkwardness for the nondisabled person meant the easiest way through the encounter was for the disabled person to accept the help and move on.
Yep. And you probably didn't mind the walk in the least, right? Just the topic of conversation?
Well, exactly. Because contrary to the main joke of this skit, and contrary to the beliefs of people with lazy compassion glands, the advent of a physical impairment does not usually transform people into attention-mongering, self-martyring idiots. Likewise, having my leg cut off did not automatically render me either instantly passive-aggressive or suddenly incapable of making considered choices about my own welfare. If it were so damn difficult for me to walk around the store, I would not have continued to work there for two-and-a-half more years. I would have attempted to change jobs within the company, or I would have quit and gone on disability while figuring out what I could do instead that would not have been too taxing.
Yet I was constantly having to reassure people that it was okay for me to have this job, a job at which I excelled. Yes, I had to tell people this in just those words. I would have perfect strangers tell me, as though I could never possibly have thought about it on my own, that I really shouldn't be doing this kind of work, should I? Was it really okay? Really? And because my job was customer service, and also because of that thing you alluded to, where disabled people feel obliged to accept the projections and interference of others simply to keep the peace and not garner extra negative attention, I couldn't just tell them to blow it out their holes; I had to be gracious. (Sometimes I was not gracious. Sometimes people would ask me what was wrong with my leg, or what I had done to my foot, and I would ask them which one. And they would get very confused. But I digress.)
And honestly even these particularly tiresome conversations wouldn't have bugged me if each had been between me and every hundredth customer who'd never seen me walk before, or even every tenth customer, as opposed to every single one. These people, mostly affluent, suburban liberals, meant well, of course, and were just, in their own completely ordinarily ignorant way, trying to be kind and thoughtful. Also, I accept that it is everyone's job to educate someone about something in this life, and I really don't have a problem explaining what happened to me, what is still happening to me (insofar as I understand it myself) or that it really isn't so bad. I do have a problem doing it on demand from strangers so very often just because when people look at me walk all they can see is what doesn't match and their own assumptions about that.
I don't know what it will take to get humans to see each other as humans first. I don't know if a skit like this one makes progress toward that goal or undermines it by validating the worst assumptions made by the laziest people, among them that "those people can never be satisfied; give them an inch and they'll demand a mile; they're just looking for attention; they just want to be angry; they're just taking out their issues on the rest of us; nothing we do is ever right; we just can't win;" etc., ad nauseam. You know what I mean.
And we haven't even talked about the fact that no woman in a wheelchair would ever be hired to work as a hostess in even a perfectly accessible restaurant* for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with access and everything to do with appearance, and making customers feel comfortable. That's a whole other set of ranting.
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* Such restaurants exist in "Thiswouldneverhappen Land," to steal a phrase from Twisty. There's a whole chain owned by Mayor Clint overlooking the beautiful Thiswouldneverhappen Ocean. There are no stairs, only wide gentle ramps, roomy and well-railed restrooms, menus with Braille, tables that can be height adjusted at the press of a button, discreet cane and crutch valets, and very few banquettes, all of them modular and easily adjustable.
And we haven't even talked about the fact that no woman in a wheelchair would ever be hired to work as a hostess in even a perfectly accessible restaurant* for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with access and everything to do with appearance, and making customers feel comfortable. That's a whole other set of ranting.
Excellent point.
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