Jokes and political satire have not been on lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. Books, blogs, memes and one-liners abound, all poking fun at the terrifying and deadly matter of the viral scourge that has killed millions of people around the globe. Disabled and older people, especially those who are poor and/or racialised, have been hardest hit by the pandemic, and have also been made the targets of Western racist humour, as well as anti-racist satire. My particular concern is with the paradox of politically woke satire carrying out its critique through the denigration of disability. Such political satire exposes racist and bogus beliefs circulating in the pandemic, but it does so by using terms that reference, sometimes with vehement hatred, disabled people. This is more than blaming the victim; it fails to acknowledge how social responses to the pandemic have had a devastating effect on disabled people, who account for six out of ten COVID-19 deaths (Aljazeera, 2021). Through an analysis of one example of this common satirical trope, I aim to show that a critical disability studies perspective can awaken political imagination by not reproducing traditional hierarchies of humanness.

Consider this: