LESSON 2

Funny Things Happen on the Way to the Future

The scariest person in the world is the person with no sense of humour.

—MICHAEL J. FOX

Comedy is free therapy. And if it’s done well, the audience and the comic take turns being the doctor as well as the patient.

—MAYSOON ZAYID

When life gives you a wheelchair, make lemonade.

—ZACH ANNER

What David Roche Taught Me

COMEDY IS ABOUT surprise. It makes us laugh. It also makes us think. David Roche didn’t fool around. As soon as he stepped onstage, he set us up. He asked us to ask him, “What happened to your face?” Some did, although most of us were hesitant. “I thought you’d never ask,” he responded, and quickly explained that his facial disfigurement was the result of his being born with a rare noncancerous tumor on the left side of his face. He described it as a combination of veins gone wild, followed by radiation burns and surgeries. “And you’re worried about having a bad hair day,” he said. “I’m having a bad face day.”

With that, the spell was broken. One of the funniest people I’ve ever met showed us why he has received standing ovations at the White House, the Kennedy Center, and art festivals around the world. He told us about the Church of 80% Sincerity, which is a church for recovering perfectionists.¹ He said that’s about as good as it gets, especially in an election year. Roche also explained male intuition, that out-of-the-blue certainty that lets guys know when it’s time for a beer. And he told us about the gang he hangs out with. It includes Frankenstein, Freddy Krueger, Quasimodo, Igor, and Leatherface with his chainsaw.

Roche describes himself as facially different. His comedic romps are also deadly serious. He is tired of Hollywood using people with facial differences to symbolize evil. “There is no cinematic metaphor that is more trite and shallow,” he wrote in an essay.² He is used to being stared at, and then to have people quickly look away—probably to scan the sky for falling comets, he jokes. He’s had people spit in his face. Once someone came up to him and said, “Shut up, you deformed, communist faggot.” That’s like a three-in-one, he told the attendees at a retreat he used to cohost with my wife and me.³

I admit that Roche’s drawing attention to his disability made me uncomfortable at the time. He was puncturing my overinflated sensitivity and showing that humor is the most fun you can have while effectively challenging and changing people’s attitudes. Roche understands that one of the jobs of the people who are visibly disabled is to carry the fears of others so they can pretend that they are normal. His humorous anecdotes lead us laughing all the way toward the punch line—that the real predators are our own fears and insecurities about being defective, unlovable, and unacceptable.

Humor is the original entertainment. Funny faces, raised eyebrows, and mimicry accompanied our evolution as a species and probably sped up the development of language—at least for those who didn’t get the joke and needed an explanation! Aside from being its own reward, laughter is a great relaxer and helps us cope with life’s challenges. There is lots of evidence that it releases endorphins, which help us manage pain, relieve symptoms, lower blood pressure, sleep better, and reduce anxiety. Laughing together also fosters trust and builds community.

Humor and people from marginalized groups haven’t got on well in the past. They’ve been on the receiving end of cruel and exploitive jokes, they’ve been the subject of cheap laughs, and they’ve been denied a sense of humor, which is another way to rob people of their humanity. Perhaps that’s why there are so many comedians from minority groups. They are products of cultures that survived partially because they maintained their sense of humor. Humor allows them to explore taboos and prejudices and make a point without getting people’s backs up. They know how to put people at ease and then to wisecrack the door open to more serious topics.

The people I’ve chosen for this lesson have made careers out of turning clichés on their head. They are not just comedic geniuses; they are experts at defusing tension and using humor to promote acceptance. They teach us the flexible and expanding boundaries of good taste. Many have transformed their anger and bitterness into anecdotes so funny that we don’t realize we’ve been taught a lesson. Some are provocative. Some are tongue-in-cheek. They are all funny and take us to places we’ve never been before.

My wish is that we always find the funny side of life’s absurdities. There is nothing like a good laugh to make us feel better and to put us in a good frame of mind to deal with our predicaments. And if that doesn’t work, David Roche says he can always get out the chainsaw.

Funny Things Happen on the Way to the Future MICHAEL J. FOX

Humor helps us sort out the difference between resignation and acceptance.

Michael J. Fox is America’s best-loved Canadian. His role as a lovable young Republican helped make Family Ties one of the most popular TV shows in the 1980s. Then he became a teen idol superstar as Marty McFly in Back to the Future. From there, the accolades started piling up: Emmys, Golden Globes, honorary doctorates, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, jamming with the Who and Bruce Springsteen, and an Order of Canada. Not bad for a kid who grew up dreaming of becoming a professional hockey player and who still cheers for the Boston Bruins.

In 1998, Fox revealed that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Contrary to predictions at the time, he is still working. In fact, most of his acting nominations have occurred since his diagnosis. Rolling Stone magazine described him as the toughest man on television. Fox admits that as a Canadian, he has never met a beer he didn’t like. He began drinking heavily after his diagnosis. His wife, Tracy Pollan, issued an ultimatum that led to his recovery. In a 2013 interview, Fox said he doesn’t need to drink: “I can slur my speech, lose my balance, and have cognitive lapses, so why would I want to?”⁴ He has been sober for more than twenty-one years, telling Rolling Stone that his “sobriety is old enough to drink.”⁵

Fox’s trademark comic timing can no longer be scripted. The symptoms of his Parkinson’s are unpredictable, and he doesn’t always have control over his movements. He told Rolling Stone that he no longer frets and sweats about a scene in advance. Instead, he reacts as things happen and goes with the flow. Fox explained that joking about his Parkinson’s does not mean resignation. It means acceptance, so that he can focus on taking care of himself. He practices Pilates, watches his health, and is careful about his diet. His wife Tracy has just co-authored Mostly Plants, a cookbook containing 101 flexitarian recipes. His brother-in-law is Michael Pollan who writes popular books about food systems. He is also vigilant about his attitude. “One’s dignity may be assaulted, it may be vandalized, it may be cruelly mocked, but it can never be taken away unless it’s surrendered,” he told the BBC.⁶

This philosophy imbues his three best-selling memoirs, including A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future. It is also the basis of the Michael J. Fox Foundation. To date, it has funded $800 million in patient-focused research. “The moment I understood this—that my Parkinson’s was the one thing I wasn’t going to change—I started looking at the things I could change, like the way research was funded,” he told Marlo Thomas in a HuffPost interview.⁷ Fox is constantly assessing the line between hope and false hope. In an interview with AARP magazine, he said, “Hope is informed optimism.”⁸

Laughing Matters MAYSOON ZAYID

Humor helps change the story.

Maysoon Zayid is a stand-up, sit-down comedian, actress, and tap dancer. She explains that the reason she shakes isn’t because she is drunk but because the doctor who delivered her was. His incompetence deprived her of oxygen, which caused her cerebral palsy. The result is that she can walk, run in high heels, and tap dance, and she shakes all the time. But she can’t stand without falling down immediately. “It’s exhausting,” she says. “I’m like Shakira—Shakira meets Muhammad Ali.”⁹ One of the highlights of her life was actually performing for “the man who floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee, has Parkinson’s, and shakes just like me, Muhammad Ali.”¹⁰ Her TED Talk, “I Got 99 Problems . . . Palsy Is Just One,” has been viewed more than ten million times and been translated into forty-two languages.

Zayid’s nonstop banter and sharp humor have made her one of the most recognizable people with a disability on TV. She is currently developing a television sitcom that will make her the first visibly disabled woman to play a leading role in a TV series. “We are not making history; we are changing the story,” she said in an interview.¹¹ She said she is an advocate, not an activist, because “activists don’t shower!”¹² As a Muslim public figure, Zayid attracts threats and trolls. She credits supportive parents and friends for giving her the confidence to deal with them. In 2016, she performed a free show for delegates at the Republican National Convention. “I thought it was going to be a tough crowd, but I got so many hugs and so much love,” she said in an interview. “I don’t think I swung any votes, but I do think I squashed some bigotry.”¹³

Zayid admits that it’s not all fun and falafel. She says it’s harder to be Muslim in America than it is to be disabled, but it’s even harder to be a disabled woman than a Muslim because women with disabilities are three times more likely to be attacked than others, and nobody believes them. She jokes that she would win gold in the Oppression Olympics. “I’m Palestinian, Muslim, I’m female, I’m disabled, and I live in New Jersey.”¹⁴ Despite that, Zayid says she knows people can’t wait to join the disability club. Admit it, she says, “it’s Christmas Eve, you’re at the mall, you’re driving around in circles looking for parking, and what do you see? Sixteen empty handicapped spaces. ‘God, can’t I just be a little disabled?’”¹⁵

If at Birth You Don’t Succeed ZACH ANNER

Laughing together builds trust and understanding.

Comedian Zach Anner uses humor to catch people off guard and to bring everyone to the same level. “Laughing at somebody is just another way of dismissing them,” he says, “but laughing with somebody is a bridge to understanding.”¹⁶ He titled his memoir If at Birth You Don’t Succeed: My Adventures with Disaster and Destiny because he was born two months early, underweight and underprepared for life. He says he has the sexiest of palsies. To prove it, he outlined “Top 10 Things I Wish People Knew about Cerebral Palsy” on YouTube. Number one: “Just because I’m in a wheelchair doesn’t mean you can pet me like a dog, and just because I like to pee outside sometimes doesn’t make me a dog, and just because I won the Westminster Dog Show last year doesn’t mean . . . OMG, am I a dog?”¹⁷

Anner’s big break came when he submitted an audition video to Oprah’s Search for the Next TV Star. The video went viral, earning him his own TV show, Rollin’ with Zach. He converted that into a YouTube channel that has had more than ten million hits. One of the reasons is his series Workout Wednesday, which helps people “achieve a body like mine” with the biceps of a Greek god simply by doing “feel-good pushups.”¹⁸ After they are done, they can drink one of his milkshakes. He calls it a handi-cappuccino.

Anner was a writer and adviser on the sitcom Speechless for three seasons. He liked the fact that the series had characters with disabilities who were complicated, were funny, and acted like jerks. He says he’s done a really good job of proving that last point. When the show wasn’t renewed, he tweeted that he was feeling pretty proud of all that he’d accomplished as a medium talent. Then he remembered white privilege and felt slightly less proud.¹⁹

Changing the World One Laugh at a Time NIDHI GOYAL

Comedy deals with the elephant in the room.

“I’m blind—so is love. Get over it,” begins Nidhi Goyal, India’s first blind, female stand-up comedian, in a TEDx Talk.²⁰ Comedy is part of her nighttime activism. She says it is a great medium to tell complicated stories. Goyal works as an international advocate for disability rights and gender justice during the day. “Women with disability are so often seen as asexual, and we need to establish that they have a sexuality on par with other women,” she said in a UN Women interview.²¹ In another interview, she said that she has the numbers, issues, and data, but she has realized that “the best way to get people to listen is through comedy. . . . I only say things people think but are too afraid to talk.”²²

Goyal’s routine covers arranged marriages, dating on Tinder, and sex. She has no shortage of material from her personal life. Once she was asked, “How do you come?” while in an aquasize class. At first she thought it was an obscene personal question. Then she realized the question was about how she got to the pool. “I come alone,” she said, “I go alone, I travel alone.” She told the TEDx audience, “I really wanted to tell her that with the level of sex education Indian men have, most Indian women come alone!”²³ Another time, a man telephoned her to say he wanted her to meet his son. “I told him I’m visually impaired, and he became speech impaired,” she said. He started to stammer and stutter. That was when she realized that her disability was contagious, she joked.²⁴

After one of Goyal’s performances in Calcutta, a woman from the audience came up to her and said she was falling off her seat laughing and cringing at the same time. The woman realized that Goyal was describing her thoughts about people with disabilities. “To do comedy,” Goyal said in an interview, “you need to be strong enough to point to that elephant in the room, which everyone is pretending is not there. And that’s something I’ve done since childhood.”²⁵

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot JOHN CALLAHAN

Cartooning takes people out of the suburbs of their mind.

John Callahan once said he became a cartoonist because he was already sitting down, which was his way of turning the tables on those who think people with disabilities don’t have a sense of humor. Callahan, who died in 2010, became paralyzed at the age of twenty-one when the car in which he was a passenger crashed into a telephone pole. Both he and the driver had been on a drinking spree. The driver escaped major injury, something that took Callahan a long time to accept. Cartooning became an outlet for his anger and his quick wit. He credited his black humor for bringing him out of his depression after the accident.

His cartooning style was described as macabre, politically incorrect, and dark. He specialized in turning clichés on their head, pushing buttons, and challenging taboos. Few groups escaped his needling—liberals, conservatives, doctors, lawyers, feminists, the homeless. At the peak of his popularity, his cartoons appeared in more than two hundred newspapers. They occasionally led to boycotts and protests. In response, he created a section on his website for hate mail.

His cartoons targeting people with disabilities were among his most controversial, although not to people with disabilities. “My only compass for whether I’ve gone too far is the reaction I get from people in wheelchairs, or with hooks for hands,” Callahan said. “Like me, they are fed up with people who presume to speak for the disabled. All the pity and patronizing. That’s what is truly detestable.”²⁶

Callahan’s memoir Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot was made into a movie of the same name starring Joaquin Phoenix. The title comes from the caption of his cartoon that shows a sheriff’s posse surrounding an empty wheelchair in the desert. When the rights to his autobiography were first optioned, he asked that it not be called Children of a Lesser Quad, a reference to the movie Children of a Lesser God, which starred Marlee Matlin, who is deaf. He may have enjoyed pushing buttons, but he was also deeply religious. He described what he did as survivor humor. “All these things that happened to me in my life, they have deepened life for me,” he told a reporter. “I draw things that are real to me. That includes death, poverty, and sickness, as well as love, profit, and religion.”²⁷

Get Down Moves LAUREN POTTER

Decency knows the difference between a good joke and a mean-spirited one.

Actress Lauren Potter is best known for making her character Becky Jackson on the TV show Glee the most famous cheerleader in history. Becky doesn’t have the sweet, lovable personality that people mistakenly associate with Down syndrome. She’s feisty and sassy. “You should see my dance moves,” says Becky. “My mom says I have Get Down Syndrome.”²⁸ She can be mean and disagreeable too. She schemes with coach Sue Sylvester to destroy the school’s glee club. “I’m Queen Bee, and I can sting like a bitch!”²⁹

Offscreen, Potter is just as witty and poised. She got her first standing ovation when she was four, and she began dreaming of being an actress. When people told her that would never happen, she replied, “Just watch me.”³⁰ After being appointed to the President’s Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities by President Obama, she said she didn’t meet him but did meet the first dog.

Potter knows the difference between a good joke and a mean-spirited one. “I have Down syndrome and human decency,” she recently tweeted. “I want to live in a world where everyone can live, go to school, and go to work without having to be afraid,” she wrote on HuffPost. “Afraid of being judged, afraid of being bullied or cyber-bullied. Afraid of new things. Afraid of failure. Afraid of dreaming. In fact, I want to live in a world where people are actually celebrated for their differences, just as I celebrate mine!”³¹ She is featured in the children’s book Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, Vol 2. “I only listened to the people who told me I could,” she said in an interview. “Don’t ever give up your dreams, no matter how hard it is or how impossible it seems.”³²

Smart Ass Empire MIKE ERVIN

Satire reveals the truth.

Mike Ervin is an author, blogger, playwright, and disability rights activist living in Chicago. He has a rapier-sharp wit and a fondness for the word cripple. Ervin has muscular dystrophy and was a poster child for Jerry Lewis’s telethon when he was younger. As he got older, he realized that the telethon’s primary purpose was to sanctify Lewis while perpetuating pity toward children with disabilities. He founded Jerry’s Orphans to protest the telethon. He has used his wheelchair as a podium ever since. He’s been arrested more than a dozen times for civil disobedience.

His blog Smart Ass Cripple has been “expressing pain through sarcasm since 2010.”³³ It is not for the easily offended or humor impaired, he says, because he wants to cause conflict in people’s minds. He explained the reasoning behind the title as follows: “Everybody loves a cripple but everybody hates a smart ass. You’ll want to love smart ass cripple because I’m a cripple and it’s un-American not to love a cripple. But you won’t be able to love smart ass cripple because I’m a smart ass, and nobody likes a smart ass.”³⁴

His friend and fellow Chicagoan, the late film critic Roger Ebert, described Ervin’s writing as “some of the fiercest and most useful satire on the web.” Ebert said that humor can be “the most effective political weapon” and that Ervin’s “[unleashes] a torrent of truth that makes us laugh helplessly because we know it is true.”³⁵ One of Ervin’s ideas is “Rent-A-Cripple.”³⁶ It’s a service offered to people who have to stand in long lines, especially at Christmas. Rent-A-Cripple matches them with a person who uses a wheelchair. Then they’ll be waved to the front of the line. Rent-A-Cripple comes with other advantages, he says: temporary employment for the person with a disability and a boost to your reputation for being associated with someone with “special needs.” He warns that it doesn’t come with a money-back guarantee.

Funny, You Don’t Look Crazy VICTORIA MAXWELL

Timing is important in comedy and healing.

Victoria Maxwell is a mental health speaker and actor. She uses her talents and sense of humor to educate people about mental illness and to give people a sense of hope that mental illness is treatable and that there are solutions. She describes herself as “the bipolar princess,” referring to a condition she was diagnosed with when she was twenty-five. For five years she denied it, hoping it would go away and trying alternative remedies. When she found herself running down the street naked “towards God,” she realized that she needed medical help.³⁷

The road to recovery included turning her creativity into Crazy for Life, a one-person stage show at a disability arts festival. The response was overwhelming. The audience was in the palm of her hand, laughing, loving, and learning along with her. I know because I was there. It kick-started a career performing theatrical keynotes, writing a regular blog for Psychology Today, and becoming a self-described wellness warrior. “I laugh when I think of how life works. I would never have the career I do had I not gone crazy in the first place!” she wrote in Psychology Today.³⁸

In a piece titled “Rules for Making Fun of Mental Illness,” she wrote, “There are times when having a mental illness just begs for some levity.”³⁹ She believes that our funny bone is our most effective and economical health tool when used with respect and discretion. Here are short extracts from her three rules, which serve as general guidelines for laughing with someone and not at their expense.⁴⁰

1. Only If You’ve Been There, Done That

If you’ve been there, done that—you can joke about it.

If you haven’t, you can’t. It’s that simple.

2. Laugh with Us, Not at Us

I don’t want you to make fun of me for being crazy. But I do want you to laugh with me when I make jokes about it.

3. Timing Is Everything

Laughing prematurely when I’ve yet to process a painful event isn’t helpful. Cracking a joke before enough time has passed can make me feel worse.

Did You Know . . .

The parody website Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical released a report showing that an estimated 98 percent of the world’s banking leadership, prior to the financial collapse of 2009, were non-autistic. It urged regulatory bodies to carefully study the impact of an overrepresentation of non-autistic people in the banking sector. It suggested that “the focus on abstract instruments (really worthless pieces of paper or bits in a computer system, with no actual strong financial backing) rather than concrete investments (tied to actual ability to repay) may be a weakness of the non-autistic mind.” Equally frightening, they reported, many of these same leaders are still in a position to cause financial damage.⁴¹

Did You Know . . .

Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby says her best work came after she was diagnosed with autism. That includes her popular Netflix special Nanette, which focuses on gender and sexuality. She says that the success of Nanette is partly due to her ability to see patterns and to not let the world determine how she should behave.⁴²