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.
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.