“Laughing with” or “laughing at” people with disabilities? Love on the Spectrum and Derek

1 Introduction

The relationship between laughter and disability is a fraught one. Disability Studies scholar Tom Shakespeare neatly sums up the relationship with his reminder that, “[p]eople with visible impairments are among the key comic stereotypes of western culture” (1999: 48). This “always-already” relationship between disability and often-derogatory laughter makes humorous portrayals of disabled individuals risky: the proverbial line between “laughing with” and “laughing at” is impossible to avoid. This paper focuses on that line. But rather than offer guidelines that might adjudicate the difference between those two modalities of engagement (a project that seems to me to be both fruitless and misguided), I will explore how “the line” is structured. How is the line between “laughing with” and “laughing at” manifested? How might we reasonably surmise when it has been crossed?

In pursuing this line of inquiry, the paper contributes to an exploration of disability and humor that is concerned with more than what Disability Studies scholar Rebecca Mallett has termed “revealing prejudicial imagery or giving ‘voice’ to ‘oppressed’ people” (Mallett 2009: 9). I agree with Mallett that work on disability and humor largely remains focused on identifying and “condemning simplified and incomplete portrayals as not affording disabled people their full humanity” (2009: 6), and that there are good reasons for such work. But I also agree with her that readings which only condemn sometimes “amount to not understanding the text” (2009: 6). Or of underestimating the text and neglecting its potential to enrich critical perspectives rather than impoverish them.

I will explore the line between “laughing with” and “laughing at” by examining representations of people on the autism spectrum. As is well known, the autism spectrum is called a spectrum because it affects individuals to varying degrees. People on the spectrum consist of everyone from individuals who are known as, and know themselves as, “high functioning” Asberger’s or Aspies, to individuals who have no verbal language, cannot perform basic practices like feeding or dressing themselves, and who can be violent towards themselves and others.

A defining clinical characteristic of autism is delayed or atypical sociocommunicative development, such as avoiding eye contact or interrupting others to speak at length about one’s own interests (Gotham et al. 2011: 32). Researchers single out humor as a dimension of language that sometimes is “especially challenging” to individuals on the spectrum (Tager-Flusberg et al. 2011: 176; also McCormick 2022). Individuals on the autism spectrum sometimes have trouble perceiving irony and sarcasm, because they tend to take language literally (APA 2013: 48; Emerich et al. 2003; Grandin and Panek 2013; Hudenko et al. 2009; Jack 2021; Lyons and Fitzgerald 2004; Pexman et al. 2011; Solomon 2010; St. James and Tager-Fiusberg 1994; Van Bourgondien and Mesibov 1987). Partly because many people on the spectrum have a divergent way of perceiving humor in others, and signaling humor, they can become socially isolated and even ostracized when they are young, which affects them as they mature and become interested in meeting others romantically.

People on the autism spectrum meeting others romantically is a focus of this paper, as I will discuss the relationship between disability and humor by examining a reality dating series titled Love on the Spectrum. I will contrast the humor raised during that series with the humor invited by Derek, a television series written and performed by the British comedian, Ricky Gervais. Although Gervais explicitly denies that the eponymous character, Derek, has any kind of disability, the way Derek is portrayed makes it impossible not to see where Gervais took inspiration to script and perform the role. I will examine the laughter that is encouraged by both series, contrasting it to show how the line between “laughing with” and “laughing at” people with intellectual disabilities is narratively woven and actively constructed in situated contexts.

2 Laughter during Love on the Spectrum

Love on the Spectrum was produced for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2019 and quickly picked up by Netflix. Since 2020, the series has been available for streaming in many places around the world. The original Australian version consists of two seasons of 11 episodes in total, each lasting approximately 40 min. An American version, titled Love on the Spectrum US was released on Netflix in May 2022. The American version is more of less identical to the Australian original in terms of format and content. It consists of 6 episodes of about the same length as the Australian series, that is to say, about 40 min each.

This paper focuses on the original Australian version of the series because it is the template.^[1]

Love on the Spectrum is narrated by a soft female voice that describes the series, 40 s into the first episode, as one that “follows young adults on the autism spectrum as they navigate the confusing world of relationships and dating”. Although there was criticism of the series, which I will discuss below, it generally had extremely favorable reviews. The movie and television rating website Rotten Tomatoes, for example, gives it an extraordinary 100 % approval rating.^[2] Even critical reviewers commented on how the series was exceptional, in that “Unlike most reality television, the production crew isn’t trying to stir up drama. No one gets voted off the island. No one is told to pack their anime figurines and go.” Love on the Spectrum was unique in that it was “a dating show in which everyone is treated with kindness” (Luterman 2020).

It took me a long time to watch the series. Even though I had known about Love on the Spectrum since its inception, I resisted viewing it because I assumed that it would be one more instance of what disability rights activists label “inspiration porn”. In a much-viewed TEDx talk from 2014, Australian activist Stella Young explains that inspiration porn is portrayals of people with disabilities that objectify them for the benefit of non-disabled people. Inspiration porn occurs in the register of sentimentality and/or pity, and provides an explicitly uplifting moral message aimed at non-disabled viewers. Inspiration porn is representations that invite non-disabled people to think “However bad my life is, it could be worse; I could be that person.” It consists of portrayals that lead non-disabled people to go up to people with disabilities and heartily congratulate them for being “brave” and “courageous”, even when, as Stella Young notes, all that the disabled person has done is get up in the morning and remembered her own name (also Ayers and Reed 2022; Beller 2020; Grue 2016; Thorneycroft 2023; Young 2014). While there are some recent exceptions – and I will argue that Love on the Spectrum, for the most part, is one – inspiration porn is pervasive in Western culture, in everything from movies like the 2014 movie about Steven Hawking, The Theory of Everything or The Whale, a recent Oscar-winning movie about a morose obese man, to inspirational quotes like one singled out by Stella Young as especially egregious: “The Only Disability in Life is a Bad Attitude.”

Remarking on that trite slogan, Young observes acidly that, “No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it into a ramp.”

I grew up with a sister who had Down syndrome, and I spent my childhood and adolescence listening to my classmates and others braying hateful slurs about MRs (mental retards), and about me, who was bestowed with what sociologist Erving Goffman (1963: 43) wryly called the “courtesy stigma” of being related to my sister (Kulick 2015). Through those experiences, and through my research with people with disabilities (e.g. Kulick and Rydström 2015), I feel that I have filled what I regard as my quota of inspiration porn and I don’t need to see any more. For that reason, I avoided watching Love on the Spectrum for a long time. Interestingly, most of the scholars on autism and disability rights activists I contacted while preparing this paper to hear what they thought about the series never saw it, often because they felt as wary as me.

The first Australian season of Love on the Spectrum focuses on six individuals and two couples. The second Australian season continues featuring three of the same people as the first, but also introduces new protagonists. Everyone in both the Australian series and the American series is in their early twenties to early thirties, with the exception of one man in the US version who is 62-years-old. Two couples live in their own apartment, one person lives in a group home for people with autism, and the man in his 60s in the US version lives in his own home, but clearly receives substantial personal assistance. Everyone else in the series lives with their parents, who feature prominently in various scenes.

The prominent inclusion of parents in the portrayals of the young people was controversial for some viewers. A reviewer in the fashion magazine Cosmopolitan who explains that she is on the spectrum herself excoriated Love on the Spectrum as “painful to watch”, among other reasons because the protagonists’ “parents often speak for them or about them while they’re there, as if they’re invisible, laughing at the “rude” things they say.”^[3]

I want to challenge this perception, which I also have encountered among academics who have seen the series. I want to highlight how the inclusion of parents places the protagonists in context. Parents and other helpers in the series add specificity to the people being portrayed. Their inclusion importantly frames the protagonists as being dependent, rather than independent. The reviewer who lamented the role of parents in the series identifies herself, tellingly, as “a 27-year-old with a career and Master’s degree” (Eloise 2020). This is arguably a concrete example of what one writer has called the “gentrification of the neurodiversity movement” (DeBoer 2022). By that he means the way in which discussion about autism in effect has been hijacked by people whose autism has never prevented them from flourishing at everything they’ve ever tried. These successful autistic people, this writer argues – and I largely agree – frequently can marginalize people on the spectrum who, unlike them, need a great deal of assistance in order to flourish and thrive: people like the majority of those featured in Love on the Spectrum (Kulick and Rydström 2015: 13–17).

But if the prominent inclusion of parents in the series contextualizes the people it portrays by foregrounding, rather than backgrounding or eliding the fact that they depend on significant others to be able to live their lives with dignity, it also does more than that: the inclusion of parents also provides a crucial narrative function relevant to the humor that is raised in the series. Parents authorize viewers to laugh.

The opening vignette in the very first episode of the Australian series features 25-year-old Michael, who many viewers regarded as the breakout star of Love on The Spectrum. Michael introduces the first season – and, because he ended up not finding love, he also introduces the second season of the Australian show. Michael is a serious young man who expresses firm opinions about ideal relationships and enjoys dressing formally and behaving with a magisterial demeanor. Michael displays several features that seem to characterize many people on the autism spectrum: a focus on the literal meaning of words, a general attitude of seriousness even when talking about topics that others clearly find humorous, a buoyant enthusiasm for explaining things, and a marked reluctance to let go of a topic that interlocutors clearly find socially awkward.

In the opening minutes of the series, Michael gives viewers a brief tour of his bedroom (which he explains that he calls his “quarters”).^[4] He introduces viewers to a pair of small wooden ducks that he says are “love ducks”, and he shows the filmmaker, Cian O’Clery (who generally is acknowledged by others as being present even though one never sees him, and who often asks direct questions of the people being filmed), a small wooden picture frame that he explains he purchased to display a photo of his future bride. The program invites us to smile at Michael’s hopeful earnestness when he tells us that his love ducks, which promise, if you sit them beside your bed, “love is sure to come your way”, were purchased six years previously, and also to smile at the fact that Michael’s plaque for his future wife remains devoid of a photo five years after he bought it.

In the scene that follows, viewers are introduced to Michael’s family: his brother Adam, his sister Liv, and his parents, all of whom live in a large, comfortably middle-class house. This scene includes what may or may not be an attempt at self-deprecating humor by Michael, who remarks to the filmmaker that he sees his younger brother as a “fresh cut of meat from God”, compared to himself, who he describes, with the hint of a smile, as “a double scoop of dog shit.”

But outright laughter first occurs in the scene that follows, 3 min into the program, during the family dinner. Sitting across the table from Michael, eating her dinner, Michael’s teenage sister Liv tells Michael that his difficulty in finding proper love is a problem he shares with many other young people. “You’ve seen how it just hasn’t worked out for me either,” Liv says, “Like, it just turns to shit.”

Michael responds by saying, with no trace of humor, “That’s also because a lot of people our age aren’t interested in commitment. They’re only interested in intercourse.”

This assertion raises bursts of laughter from his family members and becomes part of a running joking sequence. Michael continues by looking sternly across the table at his sister and intoning in a stentorian voice, “I’ve also noticed that a lot of girls when they’re your age Liv, when they’re still in high school, they only want a boyfriend for” – at which point his brother, who is sitting beside Michael at the dinner table, interrupts him, saying, “For intercourse.”

Everyone except Michael laughs at this, and the laughter intensifies when Michael turns to his brother, raises his index finger in a lecturing manner, and continues, “Not just for intercourse. But also as a bodyguard. And as a sugar daddy.”

This one-minute sequence finishes with Michael’s mother recovering from a laughing fit and says aloud to no one in particular, “I think every family should have a Michael. It just adds something different.”

That a sequence of shared laughter occurs in the opening minutes of the first episode of the first series of Love on the Spectrum is clearly a deliberate choice on the part of the producers. It sets a tone of playfulness that continues throughout. That Michael’s family obviously finds Michael delightful and funny authorizes viewers to find Michael delightful and funny. The gaze of caring family members is the nerve that runs throughout the entire series. It is a crucial narrative device that authorizes viewers to regard the protagonists’ funnily serious behavior as seriously funny (Figure 1).

Figure 1:

Screenshot of Michael’s sister’s and mother’s reaction when he says “Not just for intercourse. But also as a bodyguard. And as a sugar daddy.”

Below, I’m going to discuss another short scene of how parents (again, particularly mothers) are used in the narrative to draw viewers in, contextualize the series’ characters as dependent on others in supportive environments, and authorize laughter at their socially divergent behavior. But before I do that, let me pause for a moment to consider the accusation articulated by the autistic reviewer in Cosmopolitan that Michael’s family isn’t so much laughing with him, as laughing at him, mocking him.

What does it mean to accuse a parent of publicly mocking or ridiculing her child? Perhaps readers will grant that most parents generally do not publicly ridicule their children, unless those parents are emotionally unstable or sadistic, or unless they can be sure that everyone is empathetically in on the joke. Readers may also grant that parents of disabled children are acutely sensitive to the fact that their children can be – and often are – openly ridiculed by others. They live with that risk every day of their lives. So to say that a parent (especially a parent of a child with an impairment) publicly ridicules their child is to ignore the fact that people like Michael and his family share a very long, layered, trellised, and embedded history – in addition to sharing a clear bond of love. That bond vanishes or is radically diminished in the accusation that Michael’s family ridicules him.

In addition, I wonder where the evidence is that Michael regards his family’s laughter as ridicule? I see none anywhere in the series; in fact, if anything, Michael seems to enjoy intentionally provoking laughter both in the dinner table sequence I have described above and throughout the series in its entirety. If there seems to be no evidence that Michael feels ridiculed or diminished by his family, then with what knowledge or authority might we declare that Michael’s family is laughing at him? Is the assumption that Michael, by not protesting, suffers from false consciousness? Delusion? The inability to know his own good? That is always a difficult argument, but in the context of people with disabilities, it is a dangerous argument as well. Disability history is full of people who claim they know what is good for people with disabilities. Neither I nor anyone else knows what someone like Michael’s mother really is thinking when she is laughing, but I’m going to stick my neck out and assume that the delight she claims to be expressing is genuine.

It would be easy to analyze the laughter that occurs around Michael’s family’s dinner table in terms of the three grand theories of laughter, and claim that the laughter expresses superiority (so Michael’s family is mocking him), and/or the release of tension and nervous energy (Michael makes them uncomfortable, especially in the presence of a camera crew filming them) and/or that Michael’s disregard for social conventions regarding what is and isn’t acceptable to say is an example of Henri Bergson’s theory of how laughter is provoked by rigid or mechanical behavior.

I suggest that not only do none of those theories adequately capture what we see in that scene, but also that to interpret the laughter we witness there in any of those ways is inadequate, insensitive, insulting, distorting, and just plain wrong. What all those perspectives on humor completely miss is the affection that animates the laughter, the tenderness it expresses, and the love from which it springs. The laughter at Michael’s family’s dinner table suggests another theory of laughter – one which no one in the entire history of writing on humor, to my knowledge, ever has suggested: namely, a theory of love. We laugh at things out of delight and affection. We laugh not necessarily because we feel superior, or anxious, or because we think things are incongruous. On many occasions we laugh, like the families in Love on the Spectrum do, because we love.^[5]

Narratively, parents are used throughout the series to draw viewers in, contextualize the series’ characters as dependent on others in supportive environments, and authorize laughter at their socially divergent behavior. Another example, from episode 3 of series 1, concerns Maddi, a 24-year-old woman who, like Michael, lives with her parents.^[6] Maddi is going on a date later that evening, and in an extended scene that lasts almost 2 min, her parents ask her whether she would like to rehearse briefly.

“Yeah, good idea,” she answers.

Maddi’s mother, a pert woman in her fifties, stands in front of their kitchen counter, says to her husband, “Steve, you’re the barman,” and turns to Maddi. She says, “What are you going to do when you meet him?”

Maddi extends her hand and says, “Hi, nice to meet you. I’m Maddi.”

Maddi’s mother extends her hand, which Maddi holds on to and begins to shake vigorously.

“Maddi you don’t need to …”

“What?”

“That’s very hard,” says her mother, extracting her hand from Maddi’s grasp.

“You’ve got a weak handshake because you’re old,” says Maddi without smiling.

The rehearsal continues:

Mother: OK. Lovely to meet you Maddi. Can I get you a drink?

Maddi: A lemonade please.

Father [standing behind the kitchen counter]: Lemonade.

Mother: A lemonade too. Thank you, barman.

Father [setting two pretend glasses on the counter]: Two lemonades.

Mother: So, you look lovely.

Maddi: Oh. You look [almost one-second pause] decent as well.

At this point, Maddi’s mother cracks up. She leans forward on the kitchen counter, laughing. “You look decent?”, she says incredulously.

“It depends on what his outfit look like,” Maddi responds seriously, without acknowledging her mother’s laughter.

Shortly after this, Maddi’s father shows the couple to their pretend table, and the rehearsal continues at the family’s kitchen table. Maddi sits facing her parents. Her mother explains, “So the idea is to keep the conversation flowing.”

Maddi plunges in and asks, “Do you have any siblings?”

Maddi’s mother answers, “Uh, I have two sisters and two brothers. What about you?”

“Two brothers and two sisters,” says Maddi. “And I have six nephews and lots of nieces.”

Her mother says, “So that’s a lot of nephews and nieces. Do you want children of your own?”

To which Maddi responds, “No, never.”

At that, Maddi’s mother breaks frame and explains to her daughter, “If your answer is “no”, you leave nowhere for that person to go. Because what you’re trying to do is to keep the conversation going.”

“Let’s try again,” says Maddi.

Her mother asks, “Do you want children of your own.”

Without hesitation, Maddi responds, “No, because I think they’re a waste of time and money.” Then she smiles mechanically.

Maddi’s mother puts her hand in front of her face and says, “Good Lord.” She bursts out laughing, as does her husband. “What’s that smile?”, he asks.

“I don’t know,” her mother, still laughing, answers. “What is that smile?”, she says laughing, raising her arm and extending her hand towards Maddi (Figure 2).

“Am I not allowed to smile?”, Maddi asks in a perplexed tone, still smiling in the same seemingly forced manner.

“No, people like smiles” says her mother. “Just be yourself, gorgeous.”

“Just relax,” says her father.

At that, Maddi says, “You’re telling me to keep the conversation going, but telling me not to tell people what they want to hear. So I don’t know how to combine those two.”

Figure 2:

Screenshots of Maddi smiling after saying “No, because I think [children] are a waste of time and money”, and her parents’ reaction.

Maddi’s responses to her mother’s questions display a characteristic associated with autism, namely of treating social interaction literally. Her reaction to being told she looks lovely is to respond by saying that the person who complimented her looks “decent”. This is what conversation analysts call a “downgrading”, which is a weak form of agreement that frequently is followed by disagreements, as in this example from conversation analyst Pomerantz (1984: 64):

A: That’s fantastic

B: Isn’t it good

A: That’s marvelous

The thing to note here, though, is that Maddi’s downgrading of her mother’s compliment doesn’t invoke disagreement. It invokes laughter.

Something similar happens later in the conversation, when Maddi first is advised by her mother to not simply answer “No, never” to the question of whether she wants children, in order to keep the conversation open and flowing. When they try again, Maddi takes her mother’s advice literally, answering honestly by saying that she thinks that children are a waste of time and money. Her mother covers her face with her hand and says, “Good Lord,” and her father laughingly draws attention to the fact that Maddi is broadly smiling as she explains that children are just a waste of time and money.

Maddi’s frustrated response to her parents’ laughter exposes the underlying mechanisms behind social interactions; ones that her parents patiently lay out for her. Maddi makes explicit what commonplace interactional norms render implicit, namely that in order to converse with other people, one needs a theory of mind that can access the face of one’s interlocutor and orient creatively towards that. People on the autism spectrum often do not do this. A “relationship expert” who appears in several episodes of Love on the Spectrum reminds us that we all are taught how to greet people, how to make conversation, how to have social skills that most people take for granted. “For many autistic people,” she says, “learning social skills is not easy.” They have difficulty reading people’s expressions, and their attention to wording is frequently literal: in another scene from Love on the Spectrum, 19-year-old Chloe’s father advises her that in case she feels nervous on her date, she might tell her date that she needs to “powder her nose”:

Father:   If you get a little bit nervy [i.e. nervous], you can always excuse

      yourself. [Say] you need to powder your nose or something.

Chloe:    Okay, but I don’t have nose powder.

Father [smiling]:  No, no. It’s a saying, isn’t it … go for a wee.

Chloe:      Oh, okay. But it’s not honest.

Father:      That’s true. Maybe you could say, “I’m just gonna pop off to the bathroom.”

Chloe:      Okay.

People on the autism spectrum like Chloe and Maddi unwittingly and routinely conduct what sociologist Harold Garfinkel called “breaching experiments”. As part of his investigations about how people interactionally construct relations and worlds that they then orient to, in the 1950s, Garfinkel developed breaching experiments as important part of ethnomethodology. A breaching experiment is an activity that breaches, or violates, common, “seen but unnoticed” (1967: 36), taken-for-granted understandings and practices of everyday life, in order to make explicit the unspoken, and often unreflected-upon conventions that ground those understandings and practices. Examples range from saying “Hello” at the end of a conversation to sitting right next to the only other person on a bus. Here are two examples from Garfinkel’s book Studies in Ethnomethodology:

Case 1

The subject (S) was telling the experimenter (E [i.e. the university student sent out by Garfinkel to conduct breaching experiments]), a member of the subject’s car pool, about having had a flat tire while going to work the previous day.

(S) I had a flat tire.

(E) What do you mean, you had a flat tire?

She appeared momentarily stunned. Then she answered in a hostile way: “What do you mean, ‘What do you mean?’ A flat tire is a flat tire. That is what I meant. Nothing special. What a crazy question!” (1967: 42)

Case 6

(S) How are you?

(E) How am I in regard to what? My health, my finances, my school work, my peace of mind, my …?

(S) (Red in the face and suddenly out of control). Look! I was just trying to be polite. Frankly, I don’t give a damn how you are. (1967: 44)

Note that the response of the subjects in both these interactions is one of irritation and anger. And this, of course, would be a possible and comprehensible way of responding to the behavior of many of the individuals featured in Love on the Spectrum. But an alternative to finding breaches irritating is to find them funny. And that, indeed, is what we consistently see on Love on the Spectrum. Rather than being framed as obstreperous, insensitive, unreasonable, insensitive, or rude, the behavior of people like Michael or Maddi is portrayed as charmingly idiosyncratic and funny, routed through the laughter of the people who know them best, who love them and who are accountable to them: namely their parents and family.

By highlighting dependency, love and humor, the series invites viewers to engage with the people featured lightly, with curiosity, empathy, and care. This is important, because by the time we get to actual dates, which consistently are awkward, viewers have invested in the protagonists, and we have been primed to respond to them as we have been cued to do by their parents and families.

An example is two-and-a-half-minute scene that depicts 21-year-old Ronan’s first date with a young woman named Katie. With his mother’s help, Ronan has prepared a picnic and has just met up with Katie in a park. He takes her to a spot he has selected and lays out the picnic. At that point they have their first conversation.^[7]

Seated on a hill of grass overlooking a harbor, Ronan pours orange juice into two plastic wine glasses, and says, “A big cheers to us [pause]. For our romantic picnic.” The couple raise their glasses to their mouths and take a few moments to drink half the contents.

After remarking on what a beautiful day it is, Katie says, “Well me and my dad and my mom sometimes spend here at Christmas.”

Ronan: You sometimes come here to Christmas?

Katie: Yeah we do.

Ronan: Wow. That’s exciting.

Katie: We have a beautiful, uh, barbeque area.

Ronan: What do you have there? Like …

Katie: Like sausage. Or burgers.

Ronan: Wow.

Katie: Yeah.

Ronan: Like, sometimes I have sausages as well.

Katie: Yum.

Ronan: And not only that. I even have bacon.

Katie: Oh wow. I love bacon as well.

Ronan: Wow, what a coincidence. Same interests, it’s amazing.

Katie: Yeah.

Discussing hamburgers, sausages, and bacon in the tone of gravitas employed by Ronan and Katie – the contrast between the trivial topic being discussed and the earnest tone in which the discussion is conducted – is the stuff of comedy, and it is a good example of how and why being serious sometimes can be funny.

A potential source of uncertainty and tension here, though, is that this conversation clearly is not produced with comic intent. It is apparent that Katie and Ronan are not making jokes, being ironic, or intending to raise laughter. Because the conversation occurs between two people on the autism spectrum, viewers could also respond to it with discomfort, seeing it as an embarrassing or painful attempt at conversation by two adults who may seem incapable of speaking to each other in an age-appropriate manner.

But it is precisely at a moment like this, to contextualize such discomfort, and displace it, that the gaze of the protagonists’ parents reasserts itself. Because viewers’ reactions to the protagonists’ behavior consistently have been framed through family interactions and the gentle, knowing laughter of the protagonists’ parents and families, we know by this point in the series how we as viewers might appropriately respond to this private conversation between Ronan and Katie. The series has prepared us for this date by subtly and skillfully routing our viewing through the eyes of people who love the protagonists, support them and wish them well, and who find their socially divergent behavior endearing and charming. We have been primed to see Ronan and Katie through the loving eyes of their parents. And just as we by now know that they might smile or laugh, so are we permitted to smile or laugh.

That we are encouraged to view adults like Ronan and Katie through the eyes of parents inevitably raises issues of condescension. One criticism of Love on the Spectrum was that the series infantilizes the protagonists, through its soundtrack, which one reviewer commented “would be more appropriate for a documentary about clumsy baby giraffes than for a reality series about adult humans”^[8] and through its presentation of the people with whom the protagonists went on dates, which consisted of a brief mention of their likes and dislikes. Katie, for example, was presented like this: “Katie likes twirling around until dizzy, and the touch of Mum’s hand on her face. She doesn’t like the sound of gunshots in movies, or the feeling of something crawling on her skin.” In addition to the soundtrack and the personal presentations, as I mentioned above, some critics lamented the persistent portrayal of the protagonists’ parents.

It isn’t clear what kind of soundtrack the viewer who criticized the soundtrack might have preferred “for a reality series about adult humans”, but its bubbly light-heartedness (happy plucking on string instruments and winsome clarinet notes) seems unremarkable in relation to other reality dating shows, such as First Dates, where people meet in a restaurant and have dinner for a first date, and no more condescending than the soundtrack on a reality show like Come Dine With Me, where adult strangers go to each other’s homes and eat dinner. As for the presentations of the dates, they arguably are individualizing, engaging, and curiosity-provoking, rather than infantilizing.

The criticism that viewing the protagonists through the eyes of their parents and family members somehow infantilizes them misses the point that parents are accountable – they bear a responsibility towards their children that the series continually foregrounds through a focus on the kinds of interactions I have highlighted. This accountability constitutes an authority, and it authorizes us to laugh.

It frames that laughter as delighted laughter with, not derisive laughter at.

3 Laughter during Derek

To make this point even clearer, I will now contrast Love on the Spectrum with another television series about adults with intellectual impairments. This series is Derek, written by and starring the British comedian, Ricky Gervais. Derek ran for two seasons on British Channel 4 between 2012 and 2014. It consisted of a total of 13 episodes, each about 23 min long, and a final special tying up the series that was an hour long. Since 2013, the series has been available on Netflix.

The titular character, Derek, is played by Gervais himself as a 50-year-old man with greasy hair, an open mouth, bodily tics, sallow features, childish interests (his “favourite-est” thing to do is watch cute animal videos set to music on YouTube), staccato language, and a short attention span that leads him to interrupt otherwise orderly social interactions with sudden questions like, “If a rhino was as big as a whale, and they fought, who would win?”

In interviews, Gervais denies that Derek has an intellectual disability. He has stated, “Derek is a fictional character and is defined by his creator. Me. If I say I don’t mean him to be disabled then that’s it. A fictional doctor can’t come along and prove me wrong.” Gervais likens Derek to the gullible and credulous character Father Dougal in the Irish sitcom Father Ted, and to Rowan Atkinson’s character Mr. Bean. He says that Derek is “based on those people you meet who are on the margins of society. Nerds, loners, under achievers” (both quotes from Clark 2012).

While Gervais naturally is free to inform us that his intention is not to portray anybody with an intellectual disability, it takes a great deal of effort not to see precisely where Gervais took his inspiration to style the character of Derek and perform him (Figure 3).

Figure 3:

Screenshots from Derek.

Unlike Love on the Spectrum, Derek divided audiences when it appeared. Everyone I know who is involved in any way with the disability community abhors it, even though few of them ever actually watched it – it has a bad reputation that precedes it (as does Ricky Gervais generally in this community; see Brockes 2011; Clark 2012; Dickson 2013; Lawson 2013; Stevens 2012).

Many other viewers, however, found the series moving. Derek works in a care home for elderly people, who are used as comic foibles. In the series’ opening scene, for example, Derek introduces one of the residents, telling the filmmakers (the series uses the mockumentary format that Gervais made famous in The Office) “This is Lizzie,” he says.

“Am I?” she responds, looking confused.

Derek is a complex work, and it seems crucial to note that the show is not evidently derogatory towards old people, or the workers who care for them, or Derek. The series is about empathy, vulnerability, dignity, and care. Gervais is a professional comedian, and the series is animated by humor and laughter. Just as the people featured in Love on the Spectrum frequently are funny without intending to be funny, so is Derek portrayed as funny even though he doesn’t intend to be funny.

Significantly and tellingly, this framing of Derek as funny occurs less than a minute into the very first episode. Derek has briefly oriented viewers in the care home in which he works, and he introduces his co-worker and supervisor, a woman named Hannah, to the filmmakers. Hannah walks up to Derek and puts her arm around him.

“She’s in charge,” Derek says, smiling into the camera. “And she’s my favourite in a different way.^[9] Probably gonna marry her,” he says, grinning.

Hannah looks away, bemused, and gently shakes her head “no”.

“See I makes her laugh, don’t I?”, Derek says.

“You do Derek, yeah,” Hannah replies.^[10]

In a similar way to the way that parents in Love on the Spectrum depict their children as funny, the character Hannah here sets the scene for viewers to regard Derek as funny, rather than awkward or embarrassing.

Five minutes into that first episode, Hannah is interviewed by the mockumentary filmmakers, and looking into the camera, she says, “Derek just cracks me up. Everybody loves him. He’s just funny. I just think he’s hilarious”.

This interview cuts to a scene in which Derek, watching television in the care home’s living room, gets up to go to Hannah, who is serving dessert to the residents. Derek gets a serving of rhubarb crumble and custard (“That’s my favourite-est of all”, he says to the camera, displaying his plate). He returns to his seat, puts the dessert on his chair, gets distracted, and then sits down on it, soiling his trousers and prompting Hannah to rush over to him laughing and tell him to come with her so that she can help him clean up. This scene cuts back to the interview with Hannah, where she repeats, laughing, “He’s just funny. He’s just funny”. She throws her head back and laughs loudly.^[11]

This scene illustrates a main difference between how laughter is raised in Love on the Spectrum and Derek. Laughter in Love on the Spectrum is raised primarily through attention to language, to the socially divergent things that people like Michael and Maddi say. In Derek, though, viewers are presented with a classic slapstick routine where the Derek character sits down on a custard pie and soils his trousers. He does something silly and is literally the butt of the joke.

That Ricky Gervais takes such pains to frame Derek as funny shows that he understands what the producers of Love on the Spectrum also clearly understood: that in order to be able to pleasurably consume portrayals of adults with intellectual impairments, viewers need to be reassured that we are laughing with the people being portrayed, not at them. This can effectively be done by routing laughter through caring others. And just as parents in Love on the Spectrum authorize us to laugh at the adults portrayed there, Hannah’s repeated insistence that Derek is funny, and that everybody (therefore) “just loves him” authorizes viewers to laugh at Derek’s unwittingly comic antics.

But despite outward appearances, the humor raised in Love on the Spectrum and the humor raised in Derek is not, in fact, the same at all. As I mentioned above, Derek is a complicated text. It is not overtly derogatory, and it consistently portrays Derek as heroic. He is described by Hannah and others as “empathetic”, “he’s got a heart of gold”, “he’s too nice for his own good”, and so on. The series raises important questions about how we treat elderly people, and ‘marginal people’ like Derek. It was praised by some reviewers as a story “told with humour, heart and warmth” (Clark 2012). The reviews on YouTube, which may not be representative, but which of almost anything else frequently tend to be scathing and gratuitously nasty, in this case, are full of praise: words like “brilliant”, “amazing”, and “incredible” occur in many of posted remarks.^[12]

This kind of positive reaction deserves to be taken seriously. Let us grant that Ricky Gervais wanted to tell a tale of empathy, vulnerability, and care, and that as a comic, he wanted to do so in a light-hearted, humorous way. I think we might all readily agree that such an ambition indisputably is commendable. But the question I think we also ought to pose is this: why did he need the Derek character to tell that tale? Why couldn’t the series be about Derek’s supervisor, Hannah, for example? Or about one of the elderly people living in the group home? And if Gervais was intent on starring in a series that he wrote about human vulnerability in a care home, why did Derek need to be somebody with an intellectual impairment? That the character couldn’t be Gervais in blackface, or made-up as Asian, or dressed in drag as a woman, is clear: that sort of pretense really won’t work anymore, the Irish sit-com Mrs. Brown’s Boys notwithstanding. Pretending to be somebody with an intellectual disability, however, still seems permissible.

My objection to actors pretending to be disabled is not the grievance that only people who “share the experience” of people in group X should be allowed to portray them in fiction, research, or on stage or in films (Kulick 2015; Smith 2019). My objection is this: the reason why people like the reviewers on YouTube find Gervais’s Derek so “brilliant,” “amazing,” “incredible,” “emotional” and so on, is because the series utilizes the full arsenal of tropes and the power of … inspiration porn. Derek is a portrayal of a person with a disability that objectifies him for the benefit of non-disabled people. The show is not cruel, to be sure, and I do not see Gervais as mocking disabled people, as some critics have claimed he does (e.g. Lawson 2013; Stevens 2012). The show is frequently moving. But it is moving precisely because it is manipulatively sentimental, even mawkish. Each episode provides an explicitly uplifting moral message aimed at non-disabled viewers. Simple-minded Derek and the decrepit, often senile residents of the care home where he works invite non-disabled people to think, “However bad my life is, it could be worse; I could be there; I could be that person.” Derek is continually eulogized for being inspirational, and brave: “Everybody should be like Derek,” says Hannah a few minutes into the first episode of the show.

From this perspective, Ricky Gervais’s explicit denials that Derek has a disability are necessary. If he were to allow that Derek had a specific disability, his debt to inspiration porn would be apparent and unavoidable. Gervais must disavow that debt, even though the entire series depends on it for its very existence.

That Derek’s disability is never identified (and is even denied) makes Derek very different from the people featured in Love on the Spectrum. Those people are individuals depicted in their specificity. Derek, on the other hand, is generic; he is a clown, a bumbling buffoon whose obvious flaws may inspire us to reflect on our own.

4 Conclusion

My argument is not that Ricky Gervais is amoral and that Derek is insulting and offensive – even though I completely understand disability rights activists and others who view Gervais’s portrayal as insulting and offensive. My point is simply to note how two ostensibly similar ways of inviting laughter in relation to people with intellectual impairments who do not intend to be funny, in fact depend on two very different structures of engagement to work.

In Love on the Spectrum, laughter at the seriousness of the protagonists is invited through viewer identification with people we understand love the individuals featured in the program. Our laughter at their funnily serious behavior is routed through that love, and we are prompted to laugh with delight, not condescension or contempt.

Derek invokes inspiration porn to invite droll laughter at the kooky actions of the protagonist, who sits on a custard pie or who interrupts others with childlike questions, but who we are supposed to excuse and feel warmth towards because “he’s got a heart of gold”.

Whereas the disability we see depicted during Love on the Spectrum invites viewers to perceive protagonists as individuals grounded in specific webs of relationships and care, in Derek, Ricky Gervais uses disability as a prop. Gervais’s refusal of specificity is ultimately a refusal of accountability. In an interview, Gervais said, “If [Derek] had any specific and defined disability I would either get an actor with that disability to play the role or I would make sure I was an expert in that disability and the best person for the job” (Clark 2012).

In other words: if Derek had specificity, Gervais would be accountable; since Derek is generic, don’t point fingers at him. Perhaps we all might agree that representation without accountability is irresponsible.

And that is why I think it is reasonable to conclude that the laughter invited during Love on the Spectrum acknowledges the people it portrays and accords them dignity. The laughter raised during Ricky Gervais’s Derek, on the other hand, ultimately diminishes and trivializes precisely the people it so vigorously portrays itself as celebrating.