Sexy Like Us: Disability, Humor, and Sexuality explores the ways disabled people use humor to respond to the situation of living in a world designed for able-bodied people (referred to throughout the book as TABs, or the “temporarily able-bodied”). Predominant TAB assumptions render disabled people as one-dimensional beings—either tragic, or brave and inspiring, but never funny or sexual. This book presents the results of Teresa Milbrodt’s search for “crip humor”—in particular, sex jokes by disabled people that push back against TAB stereotypes.
In the beginning, her search did not go well. “When I embarked on a folkloric mission to collect jokes told by people with disabilities, I collided with a sad research reality,” she writes. “The best way to make anyone forget all the jokes they’ve ever read or been told is to ask them to tell one to you” (65). Instead, she recorded personal experience narratives from seven disabled people “about times when they made a joke out of their disability” (65). Some of these stories are simply about the thoughtless things that TABs do, but in others the narrators describe how they use jokes to respond to such treatment. Amy, for example, uses her prosthetic foot to play Halloween pranks on her TAB neighbors. Joshua uses a wheelchair and has a master’s degree; when TABs ask him how he takes exams, he replies with a deadpan joke: “They just give me the degree, I don’t have to take exams” (83).
These narratives comprise chapter 3 of the book. In the remainder, Milbrodt continues her search for disability sex jokes in mediated sources: blogs written by wheelchair users; YouTube recordings of standup comedy by disabled comics; and finally, a recording of a performance by the Vancouver burlesque group Sexy Voices. Milbrodt herself has a visual impairment, which she describes in a series of thoughtful "Meditations" spread throughout the book, writing eloquently and often humorously about her blind eye, her interactions with disabled friends and interviewees, and her internal struggle over her identity as a disabled person. Taken with the personal narratives in chapter 3, these meditations convey the lived experience of having a disability in a world where disability is stigmatized.
Milbrodt explains that she was first exposed to disability studies through studying the folklore of disability, but notes, no doubt correctly, that most of this material concerns folklore about disabled people rather than by them. This book is meant to remedy that lack by presenting folklore and humor created by disabled people, but despite locating the genesis of her research in folkloristics, she never engages with folkloristic theory, drawing instead from the theories and assumptions of disability studies. Similarly, her analysis of jokes is unacquainted with humor theory apart from brief cameo appearances by Sigmund Freud and Alan Dundes.
The argument of this book rests on the assumption that joking "can simultaneously be a liberatory act, deconstruct stereotypes, and reinscribe them" (143). Milbrodt subjects every joke, story, or witticism to an earnest explanation of whether the humor meets the emancipatory potential she hopes for, or whether it reinforces negative stereotypes instead. Although she firmly believes that humor has emancipatory effects, she also finds that even as comedians destabilize stereotypes about disabled people, they sometimes also rely upon other negative stereotypes that, for instance, support misogynist or homophobic themes. Much attention is given to deciding who is the butt in each case, which presupposes that every funny story must have a butt. To her credit, Milbrodt observes that jokes are ambiguous and mean different things to different people, even if they are all laughing. She also briefly wonders whether comedy can create cultural change (143), but for the most part, she remains convinced that jokes and comedy must be doing something–whether emancipatory or harmful.
Perhaps this belief explains the decision to devote a section of the book (pages 144-154) to sex jokes about disabled characters selected from websites like HelenKeller.com and from publications by Mac Barrick and other folklorists. Here she simply restates that the jokes condone violence against disabled women, objectify disabled people, mock TABs who are sexually attracted to disabled people, and so on. What’s missing from this analysis is the joking character of jokes–the fact that jokes do not make propositions. Since these texts appear without any performance context, their actual meanings and effects are impossible to declare with certainty. One of her main sources is a website owned by a disabled person, but Milbrodt does not investigate who put the jokes there and why they did so, although she does speculate about the motives of disabled people who share jokes that objectify disabled people.
The tension between seeing humor as either emancipatory or oppressive comes to a head in Milbrodt’s treatment of what she refers to as “the m-word” and the “r-word” which she excises from her texts and replaces with “person with dwarfism” (151) or “mentally disabled” (158), because, she explains, certain advocacy organizations consider them to be derogatory. Why a single word is more harmful than an entire text that makes fun of disabled people having sex, let alone other jokes that depict sexual violence, remains a mystery. She similarly censors the words “midget” and “retarded” in a transcript of a performance by disabled comedian Greg Walloch, even though he was clearly using them ironically (158). The lessons that Milbrodt presents in an earlier chapter about reclaiming negative labels like “crip” seem lost here, and so does the very nature of humor and comedy.
Work Cited
Barrick, M. E., 1980. “The Helen Keller Joke Cycle.” Journal of American Folklore 93: 441-449.
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[Review length: 931 words • Review posted on March 4, 2024]