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Able Bodied Actors Need Not Apply

Able Bodied Actors Need Not Apply published on

Being forever in search of something to be offended by, some Guardian writer has decided to attack the custom of actors who aren’t disabled playing characters who are disabled and has even gone so far as to compare it to wearing blackface!

In a waste of pixels called, “We wouldn’t accept actors blacking up, so why applaud ‘cripping up’? Some escaped lunatic called Frances Ryan complains that…

“While “blacking up” is rightly now greeted with outrage, “cripping up” is still greeted with awards. Is there actually much difference between the two? In both cases, actors use prosthetics or props to alter their appearance in order to look like someone from a minority group. In both cases they often manipulate their voice or body to mimic them. They take a job from an actor who genuinely has that characteristic, and, in doing so, perpetuate that group’s under-representation in the industry. They do it for the entertainment of crowds who, by and large, are part of the majority group.”

Well, yes, the two are different, though one shouldn’t expect someone who writes for the Guardian to be able to makes such razor thin distinctions. First, blacks are not handicapped, which means they are capable of getting themselves to the studio and learning their lines, which is more than can be said for the kind of character Hoffman played in Rain Man! Where the fuck are you going to find someone that mentally disabled who can learn all those lines and hit all those marks while at the same time delivering an adequate performance? How about someone who can do all of the above while being so disabled that all he can control is his left foot? Come one, Little Ms PC, find me an actor who has both cerebral palsy and the talent of Daniel Day Lewis. You can’t.( Maybe in ten or fifteen years RJ Mitte, the kid from Breaking Bad, will be that good, but that remains to be seen.) Amazingly, the writer comes close to acknowledging her argument’s flaws but somehow manages to sail away into la-la land all over again…

“The explanations for “cripping up” are obvious…On a practical level too, perhaps hiring a non-disabled actor is easier. The ability to walk allows Redmayne to portray Hawking before being diagnosed with motor neurone disease. But I can’t get away from the fact that, if these arguments were made for white actors “playing black”, our outrage would be so great that the scenes would be left on the cutting room floor.”

Not only does this show a disconnect with reality, it is also deeply racist. This is the second time she has equated blackness, which does not confer any intrinsic disadvantage, with disability, which is something that by necessity must involve intrinsic disadvantage. That’s why it’s called disability, because it makes you less able! Is the writer, on some level, saying black people are less able than whites? I suspect so – after all, if you don’t think apples and pears have certain things in common why lump them both under the category of “fruit”?

Perhaps starting to slowly realize that she’s spouting crap, the writer then moves on to more rational, albeit still flawed ground…

“After all, disabled characters create powerful images and sentiments for audiences. They can symbolise the triumph of the human spirit over so-called “adversity”. They can represent what it is to be “different” in some way, an outsider or an underdog who ultimately becomes inspirational. These are universal feelings every audience member can identify with. And there is something a little comforting in knowing, as we watch the star jump around the red carpet, that none of it – the pain or negativity we still associate with disability – was real.”

Why is “adversity” in quotation marks? Is she saying that being disabled isn’t really something that involves adversity? Same thing for “different.” What, being disabled doesn’t actually make you different? I guess the disabled just seem different because of, you know, all the differences! It’s almost as if, in some quasi-psychotic way, she is trying to deny the very existence of disability while at the same time writing about it! The one area in which she may have somehow stumbled onto a half-truth is that it is comforting to know that at the end of the day’s shoot Daniel Day Lewis was able to walk to his car and drive to his hotel room without crashing into a crowd of pedestrians! But that theory, at best, explains only partly why the non-disabled are so often cast as the disabled. I have yet to hear of someone who stopped watching Breaking Bad because the guy who played Walt’s son couldn’t leave his illness at the studio gates when he went home at night! No, to a sensible person – a category of creatures that these days seems to exclude just about everyone who writes opinion pieces for The Guardian – the truth is as plain as Lena Dunham late on a Sunday morning. Disabled people are a smallish minority, and within the subsets of disability they are a tiny, tiny minority. Take cerebral palsy. The bloody thing is so rare that only one in 500 people actually have it! In the US, on the other hand, around one in seven people are black! That is why blacking up is not acceptable, because there are a shitload of black actors out there, and with so many of them on tap the chances are good that you can find someone to do a great job without having to resort to a masquerade. With rare conditions such as cerebral palsy and Stephen Hawking’s illness (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which apparently afflicts only 1 in 50 thousand people) your chances of finding someone who has the requisite ability combined with the, according to this writer, requisite disability are about as good as the chances of someone at The Guardian writing something sensible!

The whole article is a joke — the half-witted caperings of an idiot looking for an excuse to be offended, a clown looking for a reason to yell “oppression!” into the echo chambers of the internet. It is the kind of thing that the right points to when they want to convince Joe Mouthbreather that the left is full of loons — it is the kind of thing we really don’t need to be associated with.

Free material for Rush Limbaugh here.

Scarlett Johansson is Thick as a Whale Omelet

Scarlett Johansson is Thick as a Whale Omelet published on

And she’s no great beauty either, despite what Hollywood’s PR machine and millions of myopic fanboys may say — weird is the word, folks, not gorgeous. But back to the lukewarm puddle of porridge sloshing around inside her head. Seems some French guy has written a novel about the adventures (mild ones from the look of it) of a Scarlett Johansson impersonator and so the squirrel-brained actress has sued him for making “defamatory claims about her private life.” In other words, for making her look bad by portraying the character as having affairs that Johansson herself never had! Amazingly, or perhaps not so amazingly given the kind of dolt that so often ends up on the bench, the French judge was stupid enough to agree with her so he awarded her 4500 Euros to compensate for the fact that a character with the same name did some things she didn’t. In a further act of idiocy the Gallic Geek In The Wig also decided that the novel hadn’t “fraudulently exploited her name, her image and her celebrity” in order to make money! To a sensible person that’s something that it clearly does do, but not to the judge, who like Freaky-Faced Girl no doubt has problems trying to figure out what to do with a light switch.

As for Little Ms Spaced Out, it’s a good thing the poor girl wasn’t named Jane Smith – can you imagine the chaos and confusion that would cause in the life of such a perpetually bewildered creature? She reads in the newspaper that a Jane Smith has been flattened by a truck, freaks out and runs down the street screaming “Oh, my god, I’m dead! I’m dead!” No, honey, you’re not – but your brain certainly is.

Another fine Hollywood intellect on display here.

God Clears Up Misunderstanding

God Clears Up Misunderstanding published on

Homophobes everywhere are in for a shock today after the Almighty Creator of Everything That Is cleared up a mistake that has long caused much rejoicing amongst many of his followers. Speaking to me earlier today, The Great And Wondrous One announced that, contrary to common belief amongst his adherents, he does not hate fags…

“I know it’s been reported widely that I hate fags, but I never said that. What I told Moses while he was writing Leviticus was that I hated stags! S-T-A-G-S! Not fags, stags!”

Surprised by this revelation I asked The Great And Holy One why he has such animosity towards the male of the deer species…

“Well, Pigster, I only made the stupid things to serve as a sort of primitive clotheslines, but it didn’t occur to me they would be so restless! Back when I was hanging out in Eden with that joker and his spare rib I would wash my robe till it was all sparkling white then drape it over a stag’s antlers so it could dry in the warm breeze that wafted eternally through paradise. Then I would sit under the Tree of Knowledge and doze off. By the time I awoke, the freaking stag had wandered off, taking my robe with him! Imagine – me, the Creator of All That Is standing there in nothing but a pair of baggy tighty whities! It’s undignified! So yeah, that’s what I told Moses when he was writing Leviticus  – I hate stags. But you know, old Moses was always a bit of a dyslexic so things got lost in translation, so to speak. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some penguins to kill.”

Well, I hope this clears up this long-standing and really rather inconvenient mistake. Today, we must all agree, has been a very good day for fags, er…I mean homosexuals everywhere. For penguins, however, it is a different story.

 

Update

Reaction to this morning’s interview with God has been swift and wide-reaching. After reading the interview Fred Phelps, Founder of Westoboro Baptist, immediately announced that he had wasted his time on earth barking up the wrong tree and that in his despair he would later this week be committing suicide by inhaling next to a Mexican.

More progressive members of the church have announced that they would from now on focus their righteous hatred on the true enemy of human morality – the stag. A representative told us that the church has just bought the domain godhatesstags.com and that starting Wednesday they will be picketing in front of zoos and national park gates…

“From now on, it shall be our holy mission to eradicate these robe-stealing, cud-chewing abominations from the face of the earth. Our signs will bear slogans such as “God Hates Stags, Why Don’t You?” and “Stags Are Lucifer In Disguise” as well as “God Kills Soldiers Because America Tolerates Stags!”

In response to Westboro’s new mission. Mr. GrassRunner Whitetail, president of the National Alliance Against Defamation of Deers  as well as vice-president of the League of Oppressed Animals had this to say…

“What the fuck? What have we ever done to them?!?! All we do is hang out in the woods eating grass and leaves and stuff! Hey! Hey, these aren’t the bastards who killed Bambi’s mom, are they? Hey, you Westboro freaks — fuck you, you orphan makers!”

Perhaps not wishing to further inflame an already volatile state of affairs, PETA has yet to make a statement on the situation.

 

Rapist On The Loose!

Rapist On The Loose! published on

In what can only be taken as yet another indication of the insanity running rampant in Amerikan universities, feminists at Wellesley have set up a petition to get rid of the gentleman on the left. Seems that they find the rather slightly built man in question to be posing a sexual threat of some kind. The man, a Mr. Rapey McRaperson, who suffers from a severe form of somnambulism, has recently taken up residence on campus and his intimidating patriarchal presence is freaking out some of the campus feminists. According to a Lauren Walsh, who penned the petition demanding that Mr. McRaperson be expelled from campus, poor old Rapey has…

” …become a source of apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault for many members of our campus community…”

When I contacted Ms Walsh to inform her that Mr. McRaperson was not an actual man but a cunningly realistic depiction of one, Ms. Walsh responded with…

“Well, of course he’s a statue now! I’m not stupid, you know! But what if he comes to life and starts raping everyone? Hey? What do you say to that, Mr. Man? Not as clever as you think you are, are you?”

Of course not – I didn’t go to Wellesley.

Backing up Walsh is Zoe Magid, who is also involved with the petition and who was very disheartened when the woman in charge of things was insensitive enough to say, in effect, “Lighten up, it’s just a statue for fuck’s sake!” Ms Magid had this to say about the boss-woman’s callousness…

“We were really disappointed that she seemed to articulate that she was glad it was starting discussion, but didn’t respond to the fact that it’s making students on campus feel unsafe, which is not appropriate. We really feel that if a piece of art makes students feel unsafe, that steps over a line. Furthermore, the kettle in the student lounge has recently been giving me lecherous looks. What does she intend to do about that?”

Feeling unsafe. Because of a statue. I wonder what such a woman does when she goes out to buy a dress? Put on a blindfold and have herself led around by the hand lest she accidentally behold a male mannequin and run screaming into the streets?

Also hell-bent on evicting Mr. McRaperson is the ironically named Annie Wang, who no doubt wants to make sure she is the only Wang at Wellesley…

“I think art’s intention is to confront, but not assault, and people can see this as assaulting,”

… Wang whined woefully.

As for being assaulted by a statue, I know some women have pretty weird sexual fantasies but this is a new one on me. Ms Wang also told us that she is really looking forward to next week’s campus showing of 2001: A Space Odyssey, adding that she was really sorry she missed it the last time it was on the History Channel.

So far, the petition has been signed by almost 400 people, most of whom are no doubt currently outpatients at some psychiatric clinic or other. The lone exception amongst this cabal of pinheads is my manager Michael, who couldn’t resist signing just so he could get some snark in…

“I am shocked and horrified that in this day and age vulnerable young women are still subjected to such rampant misogyny. I weep for this woman-hating world of ours and would like to apologize on behalf of my sex for any harm done by this latest salvo in the war on women.”

More Twilight Zone here.

 

Queer Cats Not Wanted In Nigeria

Queer Cats Not Wanted In Nigeria published on

If Sweden is Saudi Arabia for men, Nigeria is Saudi Arabia for gays. Not just gay humans, either, but also gay felines. Some brainless twat of a woman has decided that she no longer wants her cat because he seems to be a bit on the gay side!

According to Leadership, which labels itself Nigeria’s most influential newspaper, this one is for real. A middle aged woman best known in her neighborhood for wearing tin foil hats has apparently divested herself of a male cat who has been her pet for the last seven years because he’s a little pink around the edges. Not only does the cat, who goes by the ironically macho name of “Bull”, make sexual advances only towards other male cats –  who probably wonder what the fuck is going on –  but none of the kittens born in the area seem to have his markings. This has led the cat’s owner, a retired circus pinhead from Lafia, Nasarawa State, to issue this historic, hysterical, and rather unlikely declaration…

“…anybody interested in this gay cat can have it because I have no further use of it.”

She later went on to accuse the cat of not only being a witch, but also of having played a key role in the Kennedy assassination. Could be worse – he could have been a Muslim cat, in which case the woman in question could have had him stoned to death.

I should point out that the cat in the picture is not actually Bull. I don’t even think he’s gay, he probably just pretends to be gay in order to get chicks.

More here