What is the difference
Between this and a comedy sketch featuring our Downs Syndrome reporter, our spastic reporter, or our mentally retarded reporter.
A comedy character explicitly based on popular misconceptions about disability. Tasteful...
It seems that while it would be considered a hate crime to mock some disabilities, there are a list of other disabilities that it's ok to make fun of:
Autism
Tourette's
Epilepsy
Stammering
Schizophrenia, interestingly is slowly moving from the latter category to the former. I wonder what the criteria is that makes certain disabilites "ok" to make fun of. It's the same for race - comedy at the expense of different races is frowned upon on a sliding scale through black / South Asians / Middle Easterns / East Asians / whites
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B3tan Housewife, Fri 4 May 2012, 15:12,
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I'm OK with it
War is a horrible nasty business. Far too often politicians and the media try to sanitise war by taking the guts and the emotions out of it, reducing everything to studiously neutral language. This piece is funny and thought provoking because it shows how absurd such attempts to dehumanise killing would be if done assiduously.
So yes, if you want to unpack attempts to remove emotion from a situation, use an autistic reporter. If you want to unpack attempts to add humour to inherently unfunny situations, use a reporter with Downs.
(, Fri 4 May 2012, 17:52, Share, Reply)
I'm autistic
And these pieces use the tabula rasa of our logic in a way that makes other people seem abnormal.
If you're viewing them thinking they're mocking autism, it's only because you find odd speech patterns uncomfortable to deal with so you relegate them to parody instead of just ignoring and listening to the content.
(, Sat 5 May 2012, 6:24, Share, Reply)