Are You Having A Laugh? TV And Disability

Interesting stuff in this BBC documentary on the changing role of disability in comedy with excerpts from well known recent examples such as The Office, Little Britain, Phoenix Nights and Extras.

Trying to recall the earliest comedy I remember with a disability theme and thinking about it was the most unlikely of comedy characters; Alf Garnett.

Dandy Nichols was confined to a wheelchair in the later episodes of In Sickness And In Health and contained some well written scenarios with Alf coping with life with a disabled wife as well using her to queue jump to the max.

Comedy geek nitpicking alert.

Quote: youngian @ March 21 2012, 12:41 AM GMT

Dandy Nichols was confined to a wheelchair in the later episodes of In Sickness And In Health

It was actually only in the early episodes of In Sickness And In Health - she died before Series 2! But they were certainly 'later' episodes in terms of the entire Garnett cannon.

Anyway, there are a fair few posts on this already, so I'll close this thread and point you over to: https://www.comedy.co.uk/forums/thread/17987/

:)