‘It ain’t no Laughing Matter!’: Disabled People and Unfeeling Comedy Theatre

This paper provides a conceptual review of unfeeling, as an emotion, a state of mind, a conscious or subconscious thought process. Unfeeling is examined in relation to comic narratives on contemporary media portrayals of disabled people, mainly by comedians. Globally, we are a collection of societies populated by sociable primates, human beings, who often bond together and communicate culturally. How we were feeling: the psychosocial political space where we were at when we watched and/or listened to some of our culture (comedy narratives) is affected by the social structure around us. In authoritarian or liberal states, unfeeling manifests as varying degrees of societal ambivalence towards disabled people, is expressed in an innate level of schism. Societal ambivalence is evidenced in the manner in which disabled persons are referred to in media images to include comedians.