Dealing with disability

Society has a problem with disability, whether the disability be physical, mental, or both. For the time being I’m going to resist discussing the issues faced by people with mental health problems, as I’m genuinely concerned that if I begun to address it, I wouldn’t be able to stop talking (typing) until next week. I’m planning on going to Alton Towers on Wednesday and wouldn’t want to miss it.

The underlying prejudices regarding physical disability are highlighted in the media, especially via comedians’ jokes. Don’t get me wrong, I am in the camp which thinks that the vast majority of serious topics *can* be funny if dealt with correctly, the key usually being to avoid laughing at someone else’s difficulties or at the individual themselves. The BBC's "Ouch!" website is good at this – one of my favourite comments being “when you illegally park in a disabled parking spot, is it because you think that disabled people don’t exist or that you don’t exist?” Unfortunately a lot of comedians don’t seem able to make the distinction between comedy and disablism. Jimmy Carr, for example, informed his audience that when he saw a sign for a disabled toilet that read “Disabled, out of order”, he thought “I know what ‘disabled’ means thanks.” To me, this “joke” has very little comedy value, as it is doing nothing but claim that himself and everybody else who is able bodied is correctly functioning, while disabled people are some sort of sub-species. If I’m being pedantic, the complexities of the human body and mind are such that the only valid categorisation of the concept would be that the “out of order” person was indeed dead. And then they wouldn’t need a toilet.