When I broke the news story about the fake interpreter at the Nelson Mandela memorial service on my small deaf news blog last week, I had no idea just how big it was going to become.
Twenty-four hours later, the story had spread across the world. Within two days, the interpreter had a spoof Twitter account. And by the end of the week, Paul Whitehouse and Daniel Kaluuya gained praise for their gag about it at the British Comedy Awards.
I'll be honest: they raised a smile. The impassive look on Kaluuya's face as he made his "signs". The way his hand signs looked a bit "street". But the joke also annoyed me. Why?
The "fake" interpreter incident was one in which deaf people found our language mocked on the biggest stage of all, and Whitehouse and Kaluuya merely replicated it. Where was the wit? The invention? They took the easy route to a laugh, when they could have said much more.
What if Whitehouse had reversed the gag? Imagine if he'd taken the interpreter's role, but as a speaker, not a signer. Imagine if the person making the "speech" had been a deaf person, using sign language. Imagine if the hearing audience had found themselves left out and all they heard was Whitehouse shouting out nonsense, randomly, such as: flower! field! or desk!
It would have been funnier. And it would have put the audience in deaf people's shoes. They would have been listening to the kind of nonsense South African deaf people had to watch.
I've known for a long time that deafness is still the disability people feel most relaxed about having a cheap laugh at. Sure, Professor Stephen Hawking is often the punchline on Mock the Week, and I've heard (or rather, read, via subtitles) jokes about Stevie Wonder since I was a child. I also know people with dwarfism get far from an easy ride. But in life and in the media, deaf people seem to be fair game. Maybe it's because it's hard to answer back if you don't hear the joke in the first place.
Whitehouse has got a bit of history in this regard. I'm a child of the 90s, so he was a hero of mine. Except for one of his Fast Show sketches: Chip Cobb, the deaf stuntman, who was forever blowing himself up and jumping off buildings before he should have done, all because he was deaf and kept mishearing the instructions. After those episodes, I had people at school telling me to blow myself up for weeks.
Of course, that wasn't all I got told at school. So-called friends asked me "What are you, deaf or something?" before collapsing in giggles. I had people making whistling noises that sounded like my hearing aids behind me in the corridor. And plenty of other stuff besides. But sometimes I feel lucky I was deaf from birth, because I've only ever heard this way. It's harder for old people who lose their hearing to adjust, and I've seen them being mocked or thought of as stupid – just because they didn't quite catch something.
Despite that, I'm neutral about the famous episode of Fawlty Towers with a deaf woman in it because it has depth to it, and rests on some kind of truth in its portrayal of an elderly person who is unaware, or in denial of her deafness. It also offers other reasons than simply deafness alone for why the woman is difficult – her demanding nature and high expectations for her stay.
Similarly, a comedy deaf character I thought was truthful, and really loved as a result, was the puerile deaf teenager Nathan in Angry Boys. So much so that I wrote a tribute to him. Nathan was disgusting, and he only knew one sign – a middle fingered salute. But the source of his behaviour – from defecating on a car to exposing himself in family photographs – was how much he was left out and isolated at home. And we could forgive him for it, because that was the only way he could really express himself.
When comedy focuses on deafness, whether through a deaf character or a quickfire gag, what I want is the sense that the comedians are aware that deaf people are living, breathing, real people, that deafness is more than just a mechanism, and that their humour is rooted in something honest about our lives. Instead of doing what Whitehouse and Kaluuya did – grabbing a quick laugh and thinking you're clever for it.
