Disabilty representation Inbetweeners

This clip is funny because one of the characters believes that girls will enjoy the throwing of the Frisbee but the plan goes disastrously wrong because instead of the Frisbee going towards the girl he threw it at, the Frisbee goes and hits a disabled girl. People will find this funny if they have watched the programme before because they know that Will, the character who threw the Frisbee has no luck and most of his ideas and plans do not go to plan.

The disabled girl is being represented as someone who can’t really look after themselves. They have a carer there for them, someone to always look after them. She is being represented as quite innocent, someone who would struggle if they didn’t have their carer there looking after them at all times of the day. She is being represented in a humour way, the way that she is unfortunate to be on the receiving end of Will’s throw. This shows her to be vulnerable and fragile. 

We laugh at this comedy sketch not because there is a disabled girl getting hit in the face with a Frisbee, but because of the luck that the character that threw the Frisbee actually has. He was really unlucky to have that happen to him and it would have been hard for him to hit the disabled person if he was actually aiming at her. We do not laugh at the disabled person because we know that would be unkind, but we are actually laughing because it is the way that Will’s plans always back fire on him and the group.

She is not actually the ‘butt’ of the joke but one of the main characters is supposed to be the butt of the joke. This is because they are represented as ‘inbetweeners’ because they do not fit into any kind of friendship group but are just friends with each other because there is no one else to be friends with. They have to look after each other because no one else will. The way that Neil and Jay run off before it actually hits the girl maybe suggests that they believe they are too cool for that group and want to be more socially accepted.

 

I think that disabled people will not mind this being on TV because it represents the struggles that they have to go through and the teenagers that are watching this are going to be more likely to look out for older or disabled people because they do not want to be embarrassed like Will and Simon were.

I believe that some people I society are quite cultivated to look after and pity the disabled. This is because most people have feelings and feel sorry for the disabled people, they feel fortunate to not be in their situations because they know that the disabled people didn’t want that to happen to them and they didn’t choose being disabled. Some people do not feel as sorry for the disabled people, for example people that maybe have disabled person in their close family are more likely to feel sorry for a disabled person than maybe someone who doesn’t have a disabled person in their family, so they don’t understand what it is like to live with something like that.