Disability Pride by Ben Mattlin

Author:Ben Mattlin [Mattlin, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

WHAT’S SO FUNNY ABOUT DISABILITY?

The YouTube sensation Zach Anner, who has cerebral palsy—”the sexiest of the palsies,” as he puts it in one of his most famous bits—has gained an unusual degree of star power. In 2010, when Anner was twenty-five, he entered a contest to become Oprah’s “Next TV Star” for her cable network. He won. The resulting program, Rollin’ with Zach, came with a $100,000 award. But the show was canceled after six episodes, ostensibly over creative differences. The producers wanted uplifting, inspiring stories of heroic disability victories; Anner just wanted to make people laugh.

After Oprah, he created a weekly YouTube series called “Workout Wednesday,” featuring his unique klutzy and haphazard exercise routine. Before turning thirty, Anner landed a contract with the online entertainment company SoulPancake for a series called “Have a Little Faith,” a look at Anner’s idiosyncratic take on organized religions. By that time he’d moved to LA. When the ABC sitcom Speechless debuted, Anner was hired as a writer and story editor. He even appeared in a few episodes.

In his hilarious 2016 memoir, If at Birth You Don’t Succeed: My Adventures with Disaster and Destiny, Anner explains that he started making videos in college at the University of Texas, Austin—a series of short, often scatological interviews with local personalities that aired on the university’s public access channel. With boyish enthusiasm, Anner—who uses a wheelchair—says that his disability has been a mixed bag professionally. It’s closed some doors but also given him oodles of material. His career only took off, and life became easier, when he stopped “trying to do things the able-bodied way, and doing them poorly.”1 He learned to harness his disability experience without entirely relying on cringe-inducing self-abasement. A good example occurred by accident at his first stand-up gig at Carolines, a New York City comedy club. Toward the end of his set, his wheelchair abruptly broke apart. “Two bolts had shot out from the sides of the chair, causing it to slump awkwardly and stopping me in mid-sentence,” he recounts. “It was an unplanned disaster. Hallelujah! I looked around the audience, shrugged my shoulders, and said, ‘Ummmm . . . that’s new!’ They laughed. ‘I really don’t have any more material, but it looks like I’m going to be here awhile, so . . . how are you guys doin’?’ They went wild.”2

It was an I-meant-to-do-that kind of insouciance, an easy-going acceptance of life’s absurdities that some might say is the epitome of disability cool. We won’t let the foibles of our bodies or our equipment cramp our style. Nothing can stop us!

Anner’s mission, if that’s the word, is to dispel common myths about disabled lives. They’re neither the saddest, most tragic existences imaginable nor the happiest, most inspiring ones either. “Folks with disabilities are human beings just going through normal shit,” is how he puts it.3 But he only learned about disability rights when he appeared in the 2018 Comedy Central Drunk History episode about the Section 504 sit-ins. (Anner played “man in wheelchair.

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