Mel Gibson: Watch the Hands

On Saturday, August 29, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Mel Gibson walked out from behind a curtain to begin a retrospective Q&A at Fan Expo Canada, the sprawling annual gathering billed as Canada’s largest comics and gaming event and the third-largest pop culture draw in North America. An American Sign Language interpreter stood at the edge of the stage, doing the work that makes such an event available to Deaf attendees, work interpreters were doing at panels across the hall all weekend. As Gibson passed behind the interpreter, his hands went up in a burst of empty flapping, a second or three of imitation nonsense played for the crowd, and then he waved and took his seat to talk about his career. Fans had paid 275 dollars apiece for photographs and autographs. The clip of the flapping traveled across social media before the weekend closed, and by Monday he had issued a statement through the trades, blaming the disorientation of being pushed into a spotlight and apologizing to anyone who took offense.

I teach American Sign Language at New York University, levels one through five, and I have spent my working life persuading hearing people that the language on my hands is a language, with a grammar, a poetry, a history, and a people. Interpreting is simultaneous translation performed standing up, at the speed of speech, for hours at a stretch; the profession carries a repetitive strain injury rate, a certification ladder, and a code of ethics, and few of the people who found the clip funny could manage thirty seconds of it. So I watched that clip the way a surgeon watches a stranger juggle scalpels. What Gibson mocked in those few seconds was three things at once: a professional doing skilled work in public, a language that needed a century of fighting to be called one, and every Deaf person in that hall who came to enjoy the same show as everyone else. I spend more of my days defending this culture from good intentions than from open contempt, and contempt at least announces itself. The man is the occasion for this essay; the laugh is its subject.

The geometry of the moment is the first tell. Gibson made his gestures behind the interpreter’s back. An interpreter at a public event works facing the house, eyes on the Deaf section, because a Deaf audience member must keep watching the interpreter to receive the event at all. Hearing fans could look anywhere they pleased, at the curtain, at their phones, at the man of the hour. The Deaf fans were required, by the plain physics of access, to watch the one patch of stage where Gibson chose to play his bit. By every account of the video, the single person in the hall positioned to see none of the mockery was the person being mocked. The people most certain to catch it live were the Deaf attendees whose evening depended on watching that spot. He aimed a joke about sign language into the only sightline Deaf people had.

Gibson brings a long paper trail to any question about his conduct. In July 2006 he was arrested for drunk driving in Malibu and delivered an antisemitic tirade to the arresting deputy. In 2010, recorded phone calls surfaced in which he screamed racist abuse and threats at Oksana Grigorieva, the mother of his youngest child, and in March 2011 he pleaded no contest to misdemeanor battery against her. A 1991 interview with the Spanish paper El País preserved his contempt for gay men in his own words. The pattern is real, it is dated, and it matters, because a pattern is information about a person. And still I decline to end the inquiry there, because his record cannot explain the bit itself. A bit is a social act: it is played toward a house, on spec, for a laugh the performer believes is waiting there. Rooms have been supplying that laugh since long before Mel Gibson was born, in schoolyards and church basements, for performers with no fame to insulate them and no publicist to tidy up afterward. The bit belongs to the hearing world. He only borrowed it back for the weekend. One defense circulating online calls the moment schoolboy silliness with no cruelty in it, and that defense concedes my point: the schoolboy learned the bit somewhere, and the somewhere has a history.

Why does a hearing room laugh at flying hands? The oldest serviceable answer comes from Thomas Hobbes, who in 1651 called laughter a “sudden glory,” a burst of self-approval sparked by glimpsing some infirmity in another and some eminence in ourselves. The mocker of sign language performs a one-line play titled I Am Normal. His hands announce that the motion over there is excess, noise of the body, too much, while his own stillness poses as the human default. To an eye that has never been taught, signing can read as commotion, and comedy has billed the body doing too much as its cheapest act since the first pratfall. The laugh is a vote. Each person laughing casts it for the proposition that the still, speaking body is the standard model and the signing body is the outtake. Nobody in such a hall would say the proposition out loud. The laugh says it for them, in company, at volume, with plausible deniability included in the ticket price.

The vote is cast against a settled scientific fact. In 1960, William Stokoe, a hearing English professor at Gallaudet, published Sign Language Structure and demonstrated what Deaf people already lived: American Sign Language is a natural human language, with a phonology built from handshape, location, and movement, a grammar carried partly in the face and shoulders, and the full expressive range of any spoken tongue. The finding rearranged linguistics, because it proved that language is a capacity of the mind, and the hands can carry all of it. Mocking a language is itself a studied genre. The anthropologist Jane Hill spent years documenting Mock Spanish, the jokey “no problemo” register through which English speakers flatter themselves as the unmarked normal while marking Spanish speakers as absurd, and her conclusion travels well: parody a people’s language and the parody does the work of a slur while keeping the teller’s hands clean. On that stage in Toronto, the teller’s hands did the dirty work themselves.

The century of fighting I mentioned has minutes and votes in its archive. In September 1880, an international congress of educators meeting in Milan resolved for the “incontestable superiority” of speech over signs and set schools for the deaf across Europe and America on the path of oralism: signing punished, hands slapped down or sat upon, the language driven out of the classrooms of the children who owned it. Alexander Graham Bell, the most famous hearing benefactor the Deaf community never asked for, presented his Memoir upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race to the National Academy of Sciences in 1883, warning against Deaf intermarriage and pressing the speaking method as the cure for a people who were never a disease. Deaf teachers, who had held roughly four of every ten classroom posts in American deaf education before Milan, were pushed to the margins of their own profession within two generations. The successor congress, meeting in Vancouver, formally repudiated the Milan resolutions in 2010, one hundred thirty years on. A child flapping mock signs on a playground in 1955, and a movie star flapping them on a Toronto stage in 2026, are both quoting that policy, whether either has ever heard of Milan. The joke has a pedigree, and the pedigree has a casualty list of stunted educations and interrupted childhoods.

Deaf scholarship long ago named the attitude underneath. In 1977, Tom Humphries coined the word audism for the belief that the ability to hear, and to behave as one who hears, is the measure of a human being. Harlan Lane carried the term into wide circulation with The Mask of Benevolence in 1992, a book about hearing institutions that manage Deaf lives with a confidence untroubled by Deaf opinion. Audism is the conceit that the speaking way of being human is the factory setting and everything else is a defect with a support ticket. Under that conceit, an interpreter on a stage stops registering as a professional providing access and starts registering as an oddity that wandered into the shot, available for comment the way a lamppost is available to a dog.

The English language itself carries the fossil record of the attitude. For the better part of two centuries the standard label was deaf and dumb, and the second word quietly migrated from meaning mute to meaning stupid, an etymological slide that did policy work: a people presumed speechless became a people presumed mindless. The psychologist Nick Haslam, mapping how groups get denied full humanity, found two reliable routes, likening people to animals and likening them to machines, and the mockery of signers has run the animal route for generations, with signing derided as ape gesture and crude pantomime by the educators who held the children’s futures in their offices. Comedy inherits its vocabulary from cruelty and launders it as fun. When a hall laughs at flapping hands, the hall is pronouncing dumb in the modern sense while believing itself innocent of the old one.

Social psychology has measured what a joke like this does after the laughter fades. Thomas Ford and Mark Ferguson published their prejudiced norm theory in 2004 to explain a repeated experimental finding: disparagement humor rarely installs prejudice in a listener who lacks it, and reliably licenses the prejudice a listener already carries. In Ford’s later experiments, people high in hostile attitudes who were exposed to demeaning jokes about a group became measurably more willing to discriminate against that group afterward, down to cutting money from its organizations, because the joke had widened their sense of what the room permits. A joke is a norm with a punchline. A few seconds of mock signing from the evening’s headliner told every audist in that hall, and every one watching the clip later, that the room permits it. The clip was brief. The permission travels.

Interpreters and stages keep colliding in public, and the aftermaths sort the people involved with a clarity the incidents themselves lack. In January 2022, the rapper Big Daddy Kane shoved an interpreter named Billy Sanders away from him mid-song at a Virginia show, believing a stranger had rushed the stage; told the truth minutes later, he apologized to Sanders in front of the crowd, kept him on stage to finish the night, and then posted the fuller video himself with Sanders’ name and a public apology attached. There is the honest shape: a mistake, a person, a repair. In June of this year, Manitoba’s minister responsible for accessibility, Nahanni Fontaine, was caught on a live microphone complaining that an interpreter had shared her stage at a graduation she hosted, while a voice beside her dismissed the signing as “frantic hand movements”; the apologies arrived in layers over the following days, along with a pledge of Deaf culture training. There is the second shape: contempt caught off duty, followed by scheduled remorse. Gibson supplied the third shape. No mistake preceded his gestures, and no stranger surprised him. He saw an interpreter working and chose the bit. Contempt performed, then apologized for by press release.

The statement deserves an autopsy. “Spontaneous thoughtless idiocy is displayed,” it says, in a passive voice that lets idiocy display itself while its owner stands nearby, surprised as anyone. The apology goes “to anyone who was upset by it,” a formula that relocates the injury from his hands into other people’s feelings, so that the offense becomes their sensitivity, graciously accommodated. It names no interpreter, no Deaf community, no language. It assures us there was “no intended maliciousness attached,” as if malice were an accessory a man might forget to bring. As crisis management, the statement is effective because it arrived within one business day and handed editors a quotable line with which to close the story. As an apology, it is not effective because it costs nothing and repairs nothing: nobody is named, no Deaf organization hears from him, and the access he mocked stays as funded on Tuesday as it was on Friday. Repair has a going rate, and that convention posted it publicly. Alan Ritchson, the star of Reacher, wrapped his own Q&A that weekend and shook the ASL interpreter’s hand. The baseline of ordinary respect cost him a handshake and became its own admired clip. Decency, it turns out, also goes viral. Fan Expo itself, which booked the interpreter and sold the 275-dollar photo opportunities, drew its own share of the backlash for platforming him and had offered no public comment as of this writing.

Is this fame’s doing, or the man’s? Fame does measurable work on a person. Dacher Keltner’s laboratory spent two decades showing that elevated power dulls empathic accuracy and loosens impulse control, so the powerful get worse at reading the faces around them while feeling freer to act on whatever crosses the mind. Fame then removes the corrective feedback an ordinary person receives daily: the entourage laughs on cue, the convention prices proximity at 275 dollars a smile, and the industry that exiled Gibson after 2006 handed him a directing Oscar nomination a decade later, proof that the door reopens for anyone the box office misses. Insulation on that scale would degrade anybody’s manners. And yet the same hall, that same weekend, held other famous people, and one of them shook the interpreter’s hand, which suggests the insulation only preserves whatever a man carries into it. Ten-year-olds perform the schoolyard version of this bit daily with no entourage at all. Celebrity did what celebrity does: it amplified the signal and prepaid the fine. The signal was his.

One more fact from inside the culture the joke stepped on. Interpreters are bound by a professional code to render everything said on a stage, faithfully, including insults aimed at themselves; had Gibson spoken his mockery aloud, the interpreter would have been obligated to sign it to the Deaf audience with a straight spine. Access does not get to flinch. And Deaf culture is anything except humorless. Our jokes are old and merciless, and a healthy share of them concern hearing people: the oral teachers who tied children’s hands, the relatives who never learned to fingerspell a birthday greeting across forty years of dinners. The difference between those jokes and his bit is direction. Humor that travels up the gradient of power is a tool; that gesture traveling down is a boot heel. Deaf comedians have made an art form of mocking hearing behavior, and no hearing person has ever needed consoling afterward, because the joke could take nothing from them. Gibson’s few seconds attempted a withdrawal from an account his audience has been forced to defend since 1880.

Fan Expo folded its aisles on Sunday, and Gibson went back to the expo circuit, his two-part sequel about the Passion newly wrapped and waiting. The statement did its single day of work and sank into the archive where statements go. Somewhere this week, though, another interpreter will take a position at the edge of another stage, hands raised into the light, prepared to hand over everything said up there, including whatever gets said about the hands themselves. In the rows that matter, people will be watching those hands all night, because the hands are their way in. Watch the hands. On a Saturday in Toronto, one man’s mouth needed two days to compose an apology, and his hands had already told the truth in a few seconds.

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Janna Sweenie is a Deaf educator, performer, and author who has taught American Sign Language at New York University for more than thirty-five years, across all five ASL levels, and who created the ASL 5 course for the NYU minor and served as coordinator of the program. She holds a Master’s degree in Deafness Rehabilitation from NYU, graduated from the Iowa School for the Deaf, and became the first Deaf graduate in the history of CUNY Lehman. Her ASL books, written with David Boles, include Hand Jive: American Sign Language for Real Life, Picture Yourself Learning American Sign Language, Day One: Learning American Sign Language in 24 Hours, the Hardcore ASL textbooks, American Sign Language Level 5, and the three-volume ASL Linguistics for Practitioners series: Arm Angles in American Sign Language, Depicting Space, and Beyond the Hands. She is the co-author of Back to Willowbrook, For Deaf People Only, and Return of the Deaf Mute, a consultant to Microsoft, Google, and New York City museums, and half of the ASL-Opera project, in which she presents famous opera arias in American Sign Language.