Comedically challenged

Jan. 6, 2006 | In "The Ringer," produced -- but not written or directed -- by Peter and Bobby Farrelly, Johnny Knoxville plays Steve, a perfectly normal, if loserish, guy who pretends to be mentally challenged so he can enter the Special Olympics. During the montage in which Steve tries to determine the most believably authentic length for highwater pants and practices a slew of artfully deconstructed bons mots ("Hi, I'm Jeffy and I can count to potato"), we know it's OK to laugh. But later, when Steve -- as his retarded alter-ego, Jeffy -- meets characters who really are mentally disabled (some of whom are played by professional actors and some of whom are mentally challenged in real life), the line between what's funny and what's outright insensitive becomes blurrier.

Is it OK to laugh when nonprofessional actor Edward Barbanell, as Steve's Special Olympics roommate Billy, stares at Steve in cartoonishly hostile disbelief just before accusing him, with the outraged seriousness of a grand inquisitor, of scratching a favorite CD? Or even at the way comic actor Jed Rees, as Special Olympian Greg, toddles through the movie with a stylized bowlegged gait, asking everyone he meets for a hug?

Comedy courts our submission and wears down our resistance; it demands that we live in the moment. But even though we all know that the very things we shouldn't laugh at are often the funniest, most of us have an ingrained system of checks and balances, a delicate but elaborate mechanism that kicks in just as we're about to laugh at something we know we shouldn't. "The Ringer" gives that mechanism an Olympian workout, asking us to do something our parents and teachers have taken great pains to condition us not to do: To laugh at -- or possibly with, but we're not quite sure -- the mentally retarded.

With gag after gag, by the time we've asked ourselves permission to giggle, the moment has sailed by. That lapse in response time, a hesitation just a beat too long, is usually the death of comedy, but in "The Ringer," each beat is loaded with at least one question and maybe two, or three, or 10: Why do we want to laugh, and why do we feel we can't? And why are we perfectly comfortable with so-called sensitive portrayals of the mentally challenged -- the childlike daddy played by Sean Penn in "I Am Sam," or Tom Hanks' simple but pure-hearted country boy in "Forrest Gump" -- in which characters are anointed with a desperate saintliness, as if their humanity weren't enough? Maybe the jokes in "The Ringer" that don't work tell us far more about ourselves than the ones that do.

Let's talk about one major problem right up front: How are we supposed to know whether it's OK to laugh at, or even with, the mentally challenged when few of us even know the correct word to use in identifying them? (An ignorance complicated, of course, by the many different types, and levels of severity, of developmental disabilities.) In "The Ringer," one character is rebuked for his careless and insensitive use of the noun "'tard," which we all recognize (or should recognize) as a no-no. But past that point, we're on shaky ground.

We're perhaps not supposed to use the adjective "retarded," although the New York Times, that bastion of good taste and propriety, does, so the rest of us wonder, timidly, if we can, too. What about "mentally disabled" or "mentally handicapped"? No good because they stress limitations, not capabilities. Supposedly, the adjective "special" is universally acceptable, which makes sense, possibly, if we're talking about kids. But when we're talking about adults, isn't the word "special," with its aura of singsong condescension, insensitive if not outright insulting? These could be people with jobs, a sex life, a distinct and surprisingly sophisticated sense of humor, yet they're doomed to eternal infantilization. When I was in Catholic grade school, in the 1970s, I remember a nun telling us that children born with Down syndrome were a blessing to families, because they stayed refreshingly "childlike" all their lives. Although I couldn't articulate it at the time, the burden of being beatific for a lifetime, just because you were "born that way," seemed an unbearably heavy one for any human being, challenged or otherwise.

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