Navigating Neurodiversity: Humour as an Adaptive Defence in Henry Winkler and Lin Oliver’s Niagara Falls, or Does It?

Abstract

Humour plays a vital role in children's literature, not merely to entertain but also to serve as an adaptive defence to cope with difficulties, especially in narratives of marginalisation shaped by disability, race, class and gender.  Narratives on cognitive differences, such as learning difficulties, often portray protagonists who are typecast. The shift from the medical to the social turn in Disability Studies emphasises the need for reasonable accessibility practices to prevent vulnerability. Hank Zipser: The World’s Greatest Underachiever is a series of 17 books, published between 2003 - 2010, each dealing with an experience in the life of the protagonist Hank Zipzer, who has a learning difficulty. This series narrates the troubles of social exclusion and misrecognition experienced by the American actor Henry Winkler before being diagnosed with a learning difficulty. This paper attempts to study the first book in the series, Niagara Falls, or Does It? (2003), to examine how the protagonist uses humour as an adaptive defence mechanism to reframe the narrative around his learning differences. This helps him navigate moments of vulnerability and deflect instances of marginalisation into self-assertion. The study also discusses how derisive use of humour reinforces academic hierarchies. Complementing these findings, this analysis also focuses on how the teachers’ attitudes, peer relations, and family dynamics reinforce or challenge the stigma associated with the cognitive difference of the lead character.