Steven Verdile lives in New York City and works at the intersection of design, advocacy, and comedy. Verdile, a full-time wheelchair user with a neuromuscular disability known as Spinal Muscular Atrophy, knows firsthand the daily challenges that come with navigating a world not built for disabled people.
“The way I look at my own disability is that society has all these obstacles and… my disability means I can’t access certain things because of them and then when access is created, my disability sort of fades away and that is really the way I think about it mentally,” he said.
Verdile credits the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) as a critical framework for asserting his rights and navigating public life.
“The ADA is very meaningful to me because it really puts some rules and guidelines around what I can expect the world to do for me and it helps me know what I need to do to meet places where they’re at [and] hold places accountable,” he said. “I think a big reason that we have the ADA is because disabled people fought for it, it wasn’t handed to them, it was a battle to earn it.”
With that in mind, Verdile founded Squeaky Wheel Media, a nonprofit that uses comedy to spotlight disability issues and challenge systems of power. “The Squeaky Wheel [is] just another program or another initiative that sort of has to hold powerful structures accountable and we do it through humor, which is very unconventional, but we find that it’s a really fun way to bring people into the community,” he said.
Verdile also hopes to help reshape how society views disabled people.
“With The Squeaky Wheel we’re really trying to show that the disabled people have a right to things and that they’re certainly not complaining for the sake of complaining, they’re complaining ‘cause that’s the way we get s*** done,” he said.
Since launching the project, Verdile has created a platform for about 50 writers, many of whom published their first paid work with The Squeaky Wheel. “We also created a workshop program where we go to different universities and teach comedy writing specifically to disabled student organizations at different schools, that’s been a lot of fun,” he said. “We launched a television show in Canada that was really exciting and employed at least 50 disabled people.”
Though he began his career at NBCUniversal as a graphic designer eight years ago, Verdile now focuses on communications. His mission through The Squeaky Wheel, however, remains deeply personal.
“With The Squeaky Wheel, my hope is not just to make people laugh, but to make people more aware of the systematic inequalities,” he said. “I had all these stories that I wanted to tell and jokes I wanted to share… there wasn’t really a home for this type of content. My experiences are very unique and my jokes appeal to a very specific group of people and I think disabled people deserve to have comedy that’s for them.”
Mariam Guirgis is a reporter with The SBU Media Group, part of Stony Brook University’s School of Communication and Journalism’s Working Newsroom program for students and local media.
Read all 35 stories of the New York-based leaders profiled in our ADA 35 edition.