Disability is serious…or so we’re told. We are supposed to expect stories of disability to be tragic, sad, sentimental, or inspiring. No laughing allowed. It’s not funny! We’re supposed to want “lived experience” without the indulgence of imagination or invention. No fiction. No joking around in disability stories. Get real.
But comedy—specifically the comic novel—can be a powerful lens to represent the disabled experience. It celebrates play, incongruity, and contradiction. The subject matter might be depressing—illnesses and hospitalizations, altered embodiments and losses—but the comic tone is buoyant and dynamic. Comedy is a survivalist aesthetic. It highlights how life after a diagnosis doesn’t end but keeps going. Comedy can disarm ableist prejudices by making people more comfortable imagining lives they previously thought were tragic. It’s also the best genre for writing into discomfort, exploring the anxiety and confusion of how to feel about something as complicated as disability.
My novel, Range of Motion, is a comic novel about disability. It follows twins Michael and Sal as they grow up in suburban Ohio. Like my own twin brother, Sal has cerebral palsy, intellectual disabilities, and can only say a few words. He is also funny, charming, mischievous, and loves to give his brother crap. Part of my goal was to dramatize the surprising ways people like my brother show their sense of humor, whether it’s mediated by family members or even transmitted nonverbally. I wanted to reflect the comic rhythm of caregiving: the silly songs, the banter while feeding or showering, the bathroom humor. I wanted to show disabled people and caregivers not as angels and saints but as complex and flawed human beings…who are often hilarious.
The novels on this list are all comedies about disability. While there are comic memoirs, I lean toward the novel because it’s a form that allows the writer to escape the narrow road of “what really happened,” and use the full force of their imagination to reach beyond literal truth and find emotional, dramatic, and comic truths. Each author on this list has lived experience as either a disabled person or a caregiver—and each chose the novel and the comic mode to tell their tales.
Magic Kingdom by Stanley Elkin
The Magic Kingdom is the fearless comic masterpiece about disability that you need to read first. Elkin explored his multiple sclerosis in The Franchiser, but it’s in this epic novel that Elkin takes on American sentimentality, eugenics, telethons, death, and the very idea of “normal.” Englishman Eddy Bale, insane with grief from the tabloid-covered death of his only child from cancer, plots a Make-a-Wish-Foundation-like trip to Disney World for seven dying children. Once in Florida, chaos ensues. Bale’s four chaperones all have ulterior motives—one nurse wants to steal Disney’s animatronic technology. Another, in order to calm her nerves, keeps slipping off to a secret hotel room for bouts of self-pleasure. These adults have no idea what their disabled charges actually want. The real heroes of this book are the disabled kids, who are all dying of absurd diseases but still thrum with life. Most don’t even want to go to Disney World. They want to go shopping, cause some mischief, and hang out in that secret hotel room. With his full-throated, language-drunk voice, the maximalist Elkin makes a profound case for disabled quality of life.
Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa
Longlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize, Ichikawa’s Hunchback tells the story of Shaka Izawa, a wealthy disabled woman in her early 40s who lives in a care home outside Tokyo. Like Ichikawa herself, Shaka has myotubular myopathy, a rare genetic disorder that causes severe muscular weakness. She uses a power wheelchair and ventilator to survive. She is also hilarious and possesses a mordant wit and perverse imagination. Shaka writes erotica and anonymously tweets transgressive thoughts, such as a wish to get pregnant so she can have an abortion like a “normal woman.” When a male aide reads her tweet, Shaka offers him a sum he can’t refuse to impregnate her, provoking a sexual encounter that will change both their lives. Filled with strikingly vivid details of embodied self-care, Ichikawa defies expectations of pity and sentimentality in this dark satire about the erotic power of imagination.
The Colony by Jillian Weise
Jillian Weise’s The Colony is a sharp, inventive dystopian satire on eugenics, medical ethics, and mixed-up love. At Cold Spring Colony (named after America’s real life eugenics center…look it up), five people with “renegade genes” are paid to live on site and undergo genetic experimentation to cure their defects. The narrator, Anne Hatley, is a congenital amputee like Weise herself. She was born with a gene that caused her leg to stop growing at the knee and uses a computerized prosthetic leg. Anne is witty, sexy, and sarcastic…and she doesn’t really want to be cured. She falls for a bartender with a “suicide gene” and eventually consents to stem cell treatment to grow a missing limb. But the experiment goes awry with surreal side effects. As Anne’s leg starts to grow, Weise grapples with the cost of cure, the legacy of eugenics, and unintended consequences. While the satire is thrilling, my favorite sections are the whimsical chapter digressions, like a treatise on phone sex and Anne’s conversations with the ghost of Darwin at Applebee’s. Spoiler alert: he’s still got the beard and he’s not happy about the whole eugenics thing.
The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison
You don’t find much fiction narrated by Direct Support Professionals, a job Jonathan Evison did while launching his writing career. In this 2012 buddy comedy, former stay-at-home-dad Ben Benjamin is reeling from his impending divorce after a tragic accident kills his two children. He begins caring for Trev, a foul-mouthed, sex-obsessed 19-year-old with muscular dystrophy who has been coddled by his overprotective mother. Ben pushes Trev out of his comfort zone and encourages him to explore the world. They embark on a cross-country road trip to visit Trev’s hapless and estranged father. Hijinks ensue. A cast of misfit hitchhikers come along for the ride, including a sarcastic and spunky runaway who falls for Trev. There’s rich caregiving details ripe for awkward comedy: lifting, showering, and assisting with bathroom functions. But what I love most about this sardonic and big-hearted novel is the laugh-out-loud banter between Trev and Ben.
A Room Called Earth by Madeleine Ryan
Plotwise, this 2020 novel sounds like a tough sell: a young Australian woman in Melbourne gets ready for a Christmas party, goes to the party, observes people, meets a cute guy near the bathroom, and goes home with him. But Ryan’s narrator, who is on the autism spectrum like Ryan herself, is well-worth following into the night. Written in 60 short chapters, the novel’s special pleasure is the comic digressions that follow this neurodivergent character’s thoughts on everything from Heath Ledger to rules for witches. She feels disconnected from her own species, prone to getting overwhelmed, and more at home alone or with animals (especially her cat, Porkchop). Ryan’s character is a Allistic anthropologist, dissecting “normal” social situations with observations that are acerbic, whimsical, and profound. While Ryan dramatizes its social challenges, autism is not a pathology in this novel. It’s an alternative way of thinking—a vehicle for revelation and, yes, humor.
Family Life by Akhil Sharma
Written in a tragicomic minimalist style that evades sentimentality, Akhil Sharma’s semi-autobiographical Family Life is the rare book about a family member who requires total care. Eight-year-old Ajay moves from India to America along with his father, mother, and older brother, Biju. Early comedy comes from encounters with cultural difference as Ajay flounders and Biju shines. But soon, Biju suffers a severe traumatic brain injury that requires 24/7 nursing care. Ajay is a sharp-eyed witness as his family struggles with their new reality. They care for Biju at home and navigate the absurdity of America’s broken social safety net. Even as the father descends into alcoholism and the mother goes to surreal lengths to “wake” Biju to his former self, comedy arrives in how people bizarrely respond to Biju and his family’s caregiving, and how Ajay confuses love with the performance of it.
Old School Indian by Aaron John Curtis
Aaron John Curtis blends humor and pathos in this inventive tale of self-inflicted wounds, colonialism, healing, and returning home. Like Curtis, the book’s central character, Abe Jacobs, is an enrolled member of the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe and, like Curtis, he has a rare autoimmune disease that creates sores all over his body. In Jacob’s case, the prognosis is fatal. He returns to his Rez on the Canadian border and starts “healing” sessions with his Uncle Budge, a foul-mouthed recovering alcoholic who wears punk rock and Taylor Swift t-shirts. The novel is narrated not by Jacobs, but by his more provocative alter ego, Dominick Deer Woods, who mixes in poetry, history, bitter jokes, profound meditations, and gleeful asides. Is Jacobs healed in the end? I won’t spoil it but Curtis certainly dramatizes the absurdity of suffering, how a body and culture can turn against themselves, and how language and humor might repair it all.
Be Brief and Tell Them Everything by Brad Listi
In Brad Listi’s 2022 autofictional novel, a writer and father named Brad Listi attempts to come to terms with his son’s cerebral palsy diagnosis while trying and failing to write a novel. He goes on a trip to Israel for research but realizes midway through that the novel won’t work. He ruminates on his past and the absurdity of modern life while trying to be a good father and husband. Told in the sharp meditative monologues that he is known for on his Otherppl podcast, Listi dramatizes the absurd in-process thoughts of a special-needs parent: the despair, the self-conscious guilt about the despair, and the waking up to the marvelousness of your own child. Knowing that his grief is ridiculous, the protagonist embarks on a surreal and bracing psychedelic experience that transforms his perspective. Listi portrays grief as a material thing—there one moment, gone the next—spotlighting the tender moments that appear in its shadow.
Will There Never Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood
In Will There Ever Be Another You, Patricia Lockwood (author of one of my favorite memoirs, Priest Daddy) writes a hilarious and surreal autofiction of disability arriving in mid-life. At the beginning of the pandemic, a writer on a family trip to Scotland comes down with long COVID. She develops mind-altering brain fog and loses the ability to write, yet chronicles her thoughts anyway with fragmented, absurd entries in what she calls the “mad notebook.” She feels alien to herself, cleaved between “I” and “she,” and hears the song “What is Love? Baby Don’t Hurt Me” emanating from her floorboards. She attempts to relieve her migraines by taking mushrooms and tries to recover her reading ability with deep and hilarious meditations on Tolstoy. This is also a caregiving novel: the writer’s husband develops an intestinal blockage and requires open surgery, creating a wound that they refer to as “the vagina.” Lockwood’s character takes us along for the ride as she is altered by this journey into illness. Few writers are as sharp line-by-line or as funny.