It has been a very long time since Saturday Night Live was in the headlines for a good reason (probably Nate Bargatze’s first hosting stint in October 2023), and those who have been wishing that the increasingly beleaguered show would be put out of its misery now finally have their opportunity to say so. In last weekend’s episode, one sketch in highly questionable taste revealed a gang of cancelled celebrities – including Bill Cosby, Armie Hammer and Mel Gibson – as coming forward and explaining that their various controversial or criminal activities had been driven by their having Tourette’s.
The reason for the skit was that, notoriously, the Tourette’s campaigner John Davidson, who had been present at the previous weekend’s BAFTA awards ceremony, shouted out a range of insults during the broadcast, including yelling the “N” word at the actors Michael Jordan and Delroy Lindo while they presented an award. It was a highly unfortunate and deeply emotional event for everyone concerned, and the last thing that most sensible or emotionally able people would wish to do is to turn it into the basis of a tactless, even cruel, joke.
Still, when has that stopped SNL? Watching the sketch, which for some reason lumps J.K Rowling in with the rest, is an exercise in mind-blowing ignorance and insensitivity that makes you wonder who on earth signed off on it, and under what circumstances it would ever be appropriate to criticize any other group where the members suffer from a disability. Nor is it the only example of such tastelessness; Deon Cole “quipped” at the NAACP Image Awards that “If there are any white men out here in the audience, Lord, with Tourette’s. I advise you to tell them they’d better read the room tonight, Lord… Whatever medicine they on, they better double up on it.”
This sense of Tourette’s being some kind of privileged disability has been greeted with horror and dismay on both sides of the Atlantic. Piers Morgan summed up the view of many in Britain by saying on X “Hollywood continuing to mock John Davidson over his Tourette’s condition is one of the most despicable things I’ve witnessed in a long time. Shame on @deoncole and all those in the audience who laughed at his vile “jokes’” What the f*ck is wrong with you???!!!”
However, it is Tourette’s Action CEO Emma McNally who made the most dignified and yet understandably furious statement. She informed the Hollywood industry title Deadline that “We had hoped this would be a new week and we could move on but the release of further content online that has been designed to ridicule Tourette’s and reduce our community to a punchline has only deepened that hurt. I want to be completely clear here THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE. Mocking a disability is never acceptable. It would not be tolerated for any other condition, and it should not be tolerated by people with Tourette’s.”
McNally is, of course, correct. Davidson issued a moving and suitably pained statement in which he said that “Whilst I will never apologies [sic] for having Tourette syndrome, I will apologize for any pain, upset and misunderstanding that it may create. This past week has been tough, and has reminded me that what I do raising awareness for such a misunderstood condition, there is still a long way to go and I will keep on keeping on until this is achieved.” That he has had to grovel to the cruel, even vitriolic forces of progressiveness in this fashion is another ugly result of the farrago.
It might not have helped that the film loosely based on his life, I Swear, which won Robert Aramayo Best Actor at the BAFTAs, has not yet been released in the United States; had it been, then it might have been harder for the likes of SNL and Cole to mock the affliction. But the unsympathetic response, and now this open mockery, is a genuinely disturbing and distasteful trait that should, by rights, result in NBC scrapping a show long past its sell-by date in any case. That it will not says everything you need to know about broadcasting, and nothing about compassion or basic human decency.
Comments