As usual, the metatext in House MD's mise-en-scène is amazing. I really learned the significance of this poster when I stumbled across a great analysis of Chick Webb & Ella Fitzgerald--given pride of place in House's apartment, behind his piano--in Olivia Banner's book Crip Screens: Countering Psychiatric Media Technologies:
"[Ella] Fitzgerald’s first point of post-incarceration world-making began through a partnership with the crippled band leader and drummer Chick Webb. A self-taught drummer, Webb had tuberculosis of the spine, resulting in what an article in the music magazine Down Beat described as his “deformed, dwarfish, and delicate” appearance. In Drummin’ Men, a multivolume history of jazz drummers, Webb’s entry—the book’s first entry, due to his significance within jazz drumming—is studded with descriptions of his hunchback, whether they were taken from oral histories or quoted from music reviews published at the time. Webb was a legend in jazz circles, innovating entirely new methods of drum play, and his allegiance to his struggling bandmates caused him to turn down higher-paying gigs with Duke Ellington, among others. When it became clear that a female vocalist would strengthen the band’s appeal, contacts urged him to meet Fitzgerald, who, at the time, was living on the streets and busking on 125th Street. Descriptions of their initial meetings highlight Fitzgerald’s unkempt, non-heteronormative appearance. She is called ugly, too big to fit the mold of seductive female vocalists, unwashed, and uncombed. No matter those descriptions, however, as all Webb needed was to hear her singing voice and she was hired. He got her housed. Quickly, the Chick Webb band, with Fitzgerald fronting, had commercial success. Fitzgerald was eighteen years old. Within four years, Webb’s tuberculosis would overcome him, forcing him into multiple hospital stays and, eventually, death.
The partnership between these two Black musicians, one “unfit” and one “ungovernable,” was a form of crip worldmaking. Fitzgerald had managed to escape twice from prisons (before Hudson, she had escaped another girls’ prison). She was found and recognized by a drummer who surely knew that his physical status placed him always in danger of being forced into medically racist institutional settings, if not dependency on a state that would debilitate him through its racist modes of care. Together, for the four years preceding his death, they supported each other, living under the threat of incarceration." (2025, pp. 13-14)
(I recommend this book and Dr. Sami Schalk's Black Disability Politics to anyone interested in histories of disability, race, and gender!)
I love how this poster connects the show's themes with histories of disability and incarceration, contributing to the project of "crip worldmaking" that Banner develops in her book. House doesn't have just any jazz legend on his wall, he has a disabled jazz legend who recognized excellence in those the world sought to contain, was willing to reject fame in favor of loyalty and doing the work that mattered, and faced down threats of ableist incarceration.
It suggests connections between perceived genius and defiance of the rules, as well as the racist, sexist, ableist, carceral consequences of such resistance--and inversely, how House's whiteness and masculinity insulate him from some consequences of being aggressively non-normative. (Despite the privilege of not facing racism or sexism, House is eventually incarcerated via an ableist rubric of normalcy.) It connects experiences of disability to the deeper ideas of jazz, that is, playing improvisationally against the grain within the embodied expertise of lifelong learning.
House follows the precepts of jazz in medicine, with all the brilliance and risk entailed in taking up that history. And this poster invites viewers to consider House's narrative within a larger history of Black and disabled resistance.
