At its best, comedy is a safe mirror for our failings and a fresh perspective on other people. When driven by insight, it is so valuable that we should try not to take offense each time we find ourselves its butt.
I recently watched “One Leg Too Few,” a comedy sketch from all the way back in 1964 about a one-legged man written by Peter Cook and performed by Cook and Dudley Moore. (Moore was to gain Hollywood stardom a decade later.) As a child growing up in England, I loved Cook and Moore and would watch anything of theirs that aired before I was sent to bed.
The sketch, which I believe would be inconceivable today, proceeds as follows. Moore, playing the role of Mr. Spiggott, hops on one leg (the other bent mostly out of view under a raincoat) into a room where the seedy, unnamed talent agent, played by Cook, is waiting. The audience laughs uproariously as Spiggott keeps hopping around until, at the agent’s urging, he comes to rest at a chair and the interview commences.
I don’t find this hopping phase funny, but it is undeniably essential to the rest of the sketch. I note that the audience suspends any awareness that a real-life one-legged applicant would have been fitted with an artificial leg.
Once Spiggott stops at the chair, the agent observes that he has come to audition for the part of Tarzan, a “role traditionally associated with a two-legged man.”
Spiggott enthusiastically agrees: “Yes, correct, yes, yes.”
“And yet you, a unidexter, are applying for the role. … A role for which two legs would seem to be the minimum requirement.” The conclusion is obvious to the audience, but the agent asks if he need point out Spiggot’s deficiency for the role.
“Yes, I think you ought to.”
The agent informs Spiggott that the deficiency is in “the leg division … to the tune of one.”
Spiggott remains puzzled.
The agent says, “I don’t think the British public is yet ready for the sight of a one-legged ape-man swinging through the jungly tendrils.”
The agent proceeds to flounder around for words that will get rid of Spiggott while preserving both men’s dignity. He comes up with the bright idea that a “unidexter” would “score over a man with no legs at all.”
Here, some members in that 1964 audience, laughing but surely also discomfited, might have thought of Douglas Bader, the RAF hero who had lost both legs in a prewar flying accident, who nevertheless went on to fight in the Battle of Britain and, after being shot down, serve out the rest of the war in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Paul Brickhill’s biography, Reach for the Sky (1954) depicts Bader dancing on his two artificial legs with his wife.
The agent’s false comfort revitalizes Spiggott: “So there’s still a chance?”
“Of course there is still hope.” The agent suggests that it’s just possible that no two-legged man will apply for the role in the next eighteen months, in which event “there is every chance” that the agency will attempt to contact Spiggott “telephonically.” That last formal word betrays the agent’s prevarication. Spiggott stands up, shakes the agent’s hand and hops off-stage.
For the lines I quote, I’m relying on what I hear in the 1964 YouTube video, as somewhat aided by the transcript of the version of the sketch that Cook and Moore performed on Saturday Night Live in 1976.
I don’t recall having seen this sketch as a child. If I had, at that age it might have distressed me. I was uneasy when physical handicap was the subject of comedy. I had clubfoot, which had yet to be corrected at the time. My mother elevated my discomfort to an ethical level by getting annoyed whenever someone lightly said a word like “spastic” without showing awareness that it was the name of a real physical condition.
By contrast, even though I was also partially sighted, I wasn’t upset by the Mr. Magoo cartoons. I remember them from childhood mainly because they bored me. Neither I nor my partially-sighted classmates bumbled around like Mr. Magoo, so I couldn’t take him personally.
By my twenties I no longer showed signs of clubfoot, but I’d lost my vision, and my sensitivity to disability humor had shifted to humor about blindness. In 2001, a former colleague at my office published the second of her light-hearted novels, and I learned that one of the characters was a blind judge. I wrote to her to congratulate her on her publishing success, but told her my misgivings: “I hope that the blind judge’s claim to psychic powers, his typos, his constant gazing in the wrong direction, his miserable taste in ties and his overall self-deception don’t mirror your experiences with me.” I said the danger in such a cartoonish representation was that the ordinary reader would know too few blind people to have counter-examples.
In 1997, the National Federation of the Blind protested against that year’s full-length film titled and based on the 1949 cartoon character, Mr. Magoo, as denigrating partially-sighted people. Without vision, I feel I can’t make my own appraisal, but based on childhood recollections, I thought the NFB made too much out of obvious caricature. (Julie Hunter, parent of a partially sighted child, wrote a thoughtful commentary in support of the NFB’s position.)
I was more disturbed in 2008, when Saturday Night Live took to mocking David Paterson, at the time Governor of New York, who has poor vision. Most of SNL’s several Paterson sketches, over the course of nearly two years, relied on visual humor. Here’s how Gabe Pressman summarized them:
Comedian Fred Armisen portrayed our legally blind governor holding a chart upside down to make fun of his blindness. The actor wandered around the stage pretending to be directionless. Later he showed up in another skit, walking aimlessly, acting as though he didn’t know where he was.
A friend tells me that Armisen also maintains an asymmetrical facial expression, with one eye open and the other only half-open. Apparently, it is a fair imitation not only of Paterson, but also of some other blind people.
While I can’t say for a fact whether, in real life, Paterson wanders around aimlessly and keeps bumping into chairs, it’s hard to imagine that an accomplished politician wouldn’t know better than to conduct himself in such a buffoonish way. In an article published just last February in The Observer, Paterson claimed the SNL sketches caused his approval ratings to decline.
Earlier, on September 25, 2010, he made a personal appearance on the show, where he said, “Jokes that degrade people solely for the fact that they have disabilities are sophomoric and stupid.” Calling jokes about disability “sophomoric and stupid” doesn’t really help. All jokes are seen as sophomoric and stupid by at least some people. However, the rest of the time, he engaged in SNL’s particular brand of humor with other members of the show on his own terms. I admired his comportment during that appearance.
For me, the question is whether a line can be drawn between what is constructive and what is merely hurtful. The question preoccupied me as I watched that Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s “One Leg Too Few.” It’s a classic Cook-Moore collaboration where they put themselves in an absurd situation and pursued the internal logic as far as they could take it.
As I acknowledged, many viewers today would find the sketch offensive. However, I believe it shows a striking sensitivity toward both real-life disabled people and those baffled by how to handle themselves in the presence of disability. It portrays the talent agent’s condescension and candidate’s sincerity, the agent’s distress and how the candidate responds with alternating enthusiasm and passivity, and the role of politeness in preventing a true assessment of a candidate’s suitability for employment. Spiggott doesn’t beg. He is seeking neither sympathy nor special favor. He assumes he is entitled to consideration and recovers his morale even as the agent maneuvers the interview to an end. His willingness to credit the agent’s ludicrous suggestion that no two-legged men might try out for the role demonstrates a touching belief in himself. Suspending my Holden Caulfield-like aversion to phoniness, I also find the agent’s efforts to keep up Spiggott’s morale touching.
One might ask what difference Spiggott’s upbeat attitude made, since he didn’t get the job. But his optimism surely explains why the talent agent cannot bring himself to reject him outright. When a decision is deferred, even if disingenuously, you never know what might happen. If it were another job, or if Spiggott were applying for the same job in a more open-minded era, his attitude might have tipped the scales in his favor.
Another thought: Because the agent is so intent on ending the interview with both men’s dignity intact, he fails to consider whether Spiggott might have the skills and experience needed for this or another position. This point is made forcefully, if indirectly, in an alternative ending, described in a Wikipedia entry as follows:
In some early versions of the sketch … a further punchline follows after Spiggott has left. A two-legged actor walks in normally:
Cook: Ah, good morning Mr Stanger. Now I believe you are applying for the role of Long John Silver.
In this scenario, the talent agent is conducting auditions for a role for which a one-legged man would seem well-suited. But he was so focused on Spiggott’s deficiency for the Tarzan job that he overlooks his qualification for the Long John Silver role.
Today, those who hate the sketch’s premise might dismiss the clever lines, the aplomb, the theatrics. Conventional wisdom (if not necessarily actual practice) has evolved from the idea that a one-legged Tarzan is an oxymoron to a belief that, given a chance, anyone can do just about anything.
Some comedy is pure bigotry, as was the case with SNL’s treatment of Governor Paterson. For me, Paterson’s best counterpunch during his 2010 SNL appearance was, “You’ve been so busy making fun of my blindness that I forgot I was black.” Predictably, this line led to criticism on different terms. In a 2014 article, Disabilities Studies Quarterly calls it “a racially focused” joke.
The condemnation missed Paterson’s point. He was saying, you turned me into my disability and I forgot I was human.” The joke conveys wisdom in a way that only the best comedy can.
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