I don't really have a take here, but the other day I was watching suicide squad and the big shark dude's entire character boils down to him being strong but intellectually disabled. Is it ok because he's a shark? The underlying joke is still that mental disability is funny. What about big dumb human henchmen in films and cartoons? You know the ones, who go 'uhhhh boss what are we gonna do?' in a 'slow' voice and the boss is like 'get them you imbeciles'...
In the moment the audience and I found it funny, but I never really thought as to why.
At what point does someone go from being stupid to mentally disabled? Why's it ok to make fun of someone for being stupid but not mentally disabled? Neither person can help their mental ability.
Like, I've got a couple friends who are perfectly functional but at school no matter how hard they tried they'd never get good grades. Sometimes they'll say some dumb shit, and people will laugh at them for it.
Maybe I’m wrong here, but I feel like equating severe stupidity with an actual mental disability is in and of itself offensive to people with mental disabilities. There is a large difference, in my mind, between someone with a learning disability and just your stupid friend from high school. I knew several people I would consider pretty intelligent who always struggled with school because they had a learning disability. They were smart guys but because of their specific disorders it was hard to retain information or keep focus in a classroom setting. They worked hard to overcome these things and I would think it’s shitty to equate their experience of struggling with an actual mental disorder to some of my other friends who are simply bona fide dimwits. You can just be stupid without being handicapped
Yeah, I thought that too. Was just having a ponder is all. I got friends like that too who are dyslexic or ADHD so didn't do so well at school despite being perfectly smart.
I still don't think that addresses the issue of who's okay to make fun of though.
Stupidity in fiction is pretty interesting when compared to stupidity in real life. Stupidity is such a large part of the human experience, literally everyone is sometimes a little slow on the uptake, doesn't think enough before acting, believes something that is obviously false, has bad logic, etc. In real life, humor mined from this is often completely harmless.
But in fiction, there are characters that are smart and never dumb, or dumb and very rarely smart. If a scientist, who are often supposed to be smart in fiction (contrary to real life), acts stupidly, it is often seen as a mistake by the writer. If a stupid character acts smartly it is seen as a subversion of a trope. This in effect essentializes smartness and stupidity, and dehumanizes the characters. So all dumb characters become essentially dumb and dehumanized, which has unfortunate parallels with how mental disability is seen even when that was not the intention.
I think season 1 Patrick from :spongebob-party: is a good example of non-problematic stupidity. He's just less knowledgeable than most people around him and are too lazy to rectify it, confidently living his life with that limited worldview.
Patrick is good because his character is actually funny. "dumb character" is usually just completely boring and predictable.
Yeah I was thinking about this a lot whenever I was watching The Good Place a bit ago. Like the show makes it clear that Jason barely even understands what's going on around them most of the time, and yet it's constantly played off as comedy. Not a single point when they were criticizing the system did they ever realize "hey wait a minute how come someone like Jason who doesn't even know what the fuck is going on gets judged in the same way that's not fair".
Even outside of how offensive his character was to begin with, they couldn't even make the one obvious point that I thought they were going to try with him because his entire point of existence was to laugh at him haha what an idiot style.
And it's actually quite upsetting because I have family members who do have trouble understanding the world around them, and I really hate the idea of people laughing about them too much.
I thought they did at least imply that it wasn't fair to judge Jason by moral standards he doesn't understand
TBF they might have at some point when I wasn't paying as much attention. A lot of the character dynamics and relationships got a bit boring over time.
I always hate this, and I especially hate this with King Shark, as it's kind of a significant departure from the way he's been depicted lately. In spite of its problems, I think the Harley Quinn show does a really good job with characterization.
I love him in the Harley quinn show, he's basically the opposite of how the movie portrays him, a smart tech guy who hates killing people.
Exactly, so much better. Total whiplash to see that portrayal and then this one.
