Disabled Humor

David Paterson is a blind guy who can take a joke.

In fact, the New York governor is often the one who delivers the punch line. In an interview earlier this year with CBS news anchor Katie Couric, for example, Paterson described a childhood dream.

"When I was younger, I actually wanted to be a police officer," he said. "But I didn't know how to run into a room and say: 'Stick 'em up! Are they up?'"

Paterson often makes light of what most of us would consider an unbearable darkness. But blindness is his joke to make, not ours, which is why a recent "Saturday Night Live" skit has provoked outrage.

In the skit, "SNL" cast member Fred Armisen depicted the legally blind governor not only as visually challenged but also as a disoriented, bungling fool.

Jokes about the Democratic governor's behavior, including his cocaine use years ago and marital infidelity not so long ago, were certainly fair game and comically lethal in the gifted mimic's hands. The satire failed, though, when Armisen portrayed Paterson's physical limitations as mentally disabling, too.

Throughout the four-minute segment, Armisen squinted his right eye and let his left eye wander. He made his entrance by rolling aimlessly in his chair behind the "Weekend Update" desk. At one point, he held upside down a chart indicating the unemployment rate.

When asked about the governor's appointment to replace U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Armisen cracked, "I'm tired of all these fancy two-eyed smart alecks from the big city running the show." He just might appoint "someone with … a gamy arm or … maybe the giant gums with the tiny teeth."

After his "interview" was over, Armisen wandered in front of the camera, chatting on a cell phone.

If this isn't your idea of funny, you would have stuck out in the audience like a dour biddy who can't take a joke. Most of the crowd howled.

Maybe it's another version of whistling past the graveyard. As long as we're laughing, it never can happen to us.

I hear those poor Sarah Palin fans even as I write: What about all those Tina Fey skits? Where was your indignation when "SNL" made the Republican vice presidential nominee look like a perky little loon?

When it comes to picking targets for humor, I am reminded of what New York Times ethics columnist Randy Cohen told me in a 2002 interview, when he described the philosophy of his former boss David Letterman:

"We are free to attack what is volitional, but not those things over which a person has no control."

I can see Russia from my front porch : funny.

I can't see the person in front of me : not so funny.

Another "SNL" skit that night poked fun of scandalized Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, including a few jabs at his poofy hair. And that was before we learned that the Democratic governor erupted in fury whenever his staff forgot his favorite Paul Mitchell hairbrush.

The Paterson parody provoked outrage from the usual advocates, including the National Federation of the Blind, which argued that the stereotypes depicted by Armisen contribute to the high unemployment rate of blind adults.

"(It's) an attack on all blind Americans — blind children, blind adults, blind seniors, and newly blinded veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan," spokesman Chris Danielsen said.

Time for a few deep breaths. The skit was tasteless and unfair, but it did not set the national agenda for the disabled. It might, however, provoke a national conversation about harmful stereotypes.

In that same interview with Katie Couric, Paterson admitted that his every public speech is a high-wire act. No notes, no written text. Sometimes at events, he introduces more than two dozen people at a time — in the right order, from memory.

He wasn't joking, either.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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