In-Groups and Out-Groups: Tube Pedicle Humor, Facial Difference, and the Guinea Pig Club
- Christine Slobogin
- 12 hours ago
- 6 min read
During the Second World War, injured individuals in Scotland formed a group called “The Dangle ‘Ums Club.” The name was inspired by the tube pedicle, a ubiquitous surgical technique in this period that was used to transfer tissue to reconstruct injured body parts – particularly noses, chins, or ears. Flesh was partially cut from the body, rolled into a tube, and slowly transferred end-by-end from the donor site on the patient’s own body to the area of reconstruction. Patients endured extended periods of time with this unnatural-looking appendage on their face or other parts of their body, often holding uncomfortable positions to keep it in place. There is an intrinsic irony in the tube pedicle procedure: meant to restore some level of normative appearance and function, it temporarily made the faces of these patients even more different. Rooted in part in this irony, there were seemingly endless ways to joke about this fleshy surgical object, and both medical practitioners and newly disabled patients used it to poke fun at and release the tensions of the traumatic months of surgical reconstruction. For example, in order to turn something that was painful, awkward, and uncomfortable into a joke, The Dangle ‘Ums Club gave the unsightly apparatus a humorous nickname: the “dangle ‘um.” This follows the superiority theory of humor, in which the thing being joked about becomes inferior and mockable – not something to be feared. Instead of the injured themselves being mocked, that potential perceived inferiority was transferred to the tube pedicle.
This type of tube pedicle humor also appeared in the banter and publications of the better-known Guinea Pig Club, who also infused humor into their name, inspired by their generally good-natured feeling that they were being used as surgical test subjects. As noted in a 1947 issue of the Guinea Pig Club’s magazine, this was perhaps “the most exclusive Club in the world, but the entrance fee is something most men would not care to pay, and the conditions of membership are arduous in the extreme.” Primarily Royal Air Force pilots, Guinea Pigs had been injured and / or burned in battle and subsequently underwent reconstructive plastic surgery overseen by Archibald McIndoe at Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead. Before, during, and even after these repairs, these men lived with obvious facial difference, scarred hands and bodies, and varying disabilities.
Examining the tube pedicle offers insight into how the intersection of disability and humor can change who is part of the “in-group” and who is part of the “out-group” – meaning, who is “in” society and “in” on the joke, and who is “out.” The official designation of the Guinea Pig Club, its communications, and its reunions quite clearly delineated an “in-group” for those who might typically be ostracized and considered an “out-group” because of their non-normative faces and bodies. The humor that was cultivated by these men also helped to solidify their group identity. For example, irony about ability and disability infused the reasons that certain leaders of the group were chosen: the secretary because his burned fingers would keep him from writing too much, and the treasurer because his burned legs would keep him from running off with the club’s funds.
The tube pedicle was both a target and a vehicle for jokes, for both the Guinea Pig’s surgeons and the patients themselves. In examining tube pedicle jokes, I realized the significance of who was telling these jokes, which inflected how they were told and what work they did on group dynamics. The positionality of those making jokes at the expense of non-normative bodies matters, affecting how in-groups or out-groups are created, either cementing a community of those typically “othered,” or contributing to their exclusion. This dynamic is well-considered in research on disability and humor, where the borders between in- and out-groups are closely considered and debated.
The jokes about tube pedicles in the Guinea Pig Club’s magazine, The Guinea Pig, demonstrate how joking about this surgical procedure strengthened the bonds of this group, during and beyond the Second World War. One story from the December 1947 issue combined humor with an acknowledgment of the frightening appearance as well as the ridiculousness of this dangly bit of flesh. Called “Ghost Story for Guinea Pigs: As True As I’m Standing Here...,” this two-page spread tells of a Guinea Pig with a tube pedicle attached to his nose who visited a haunted house, encountering ghosts on the first night of his stay. However, as soon as the ghosts saw the Guinea Pig, the sight of his pedicle “shook ‘em horrible ... The Screaming Nun gave a whimper of fright and vanished through the wall; the Headless Page turned and bolted clean through the wardrobe. Sir Ralph the Ghoul gave a convulsive shudder, snatched up his rusty, trailing chains in his skeletal hands, and dashed headlong from that room.” Dramatically, this story transformed the tube pedicle from a negative, painful infringement on the man’s appearance – something that could isolate him from society – to something heroic with extraordinary powers. After the ghosts cleared, this Guinea Pig “slept peacefully,” and he was “told that not a single ghost has been seen or heard there from that day to this.” By placing the tube pedicle into a humorous story that endows it with the ability to banish ghosts, the author both acknowledged the strangeness of a Guinea Pig’s face, while weakening the negative influence that the tube pedicle might hold over a person to make him feel ashamed or afraid. Bantering like this about the difficult and life-changing experience of facial injury and plastic reconstruction was an important part of the physical and psychological recovery process for these patients.
Doctors also joked about the tube pedicle, but there was a difference in the delivery, appearance, and result of these jokes. The surgeons most known for working with tube pedicles to reconstruct the injured– Archibald McIndoe and Harold Gillies – would joke irreverently about the tube pedicle (even in their plastic surgery textbooks). These surgeons joked about the tube pedicle in a markedly visual manner – showing the pedicle in cartoons or collages – while the men who actually experienced the procedure kept the tube pedicle to written jokes, not directly visualizing it in their magazine. The surgeons treating these men were flippant with their humor around tube pedicles, comparing them to “sausages” or “marsupial pouches,” or collaging photographs of them into grotesque medleys. While it may seem that these surgeons were joking alongside and in a similar vein to their patients, the positionality of the joker must be taken into account. The chipper camaraderie of McIndoe at East Grinstead was appreciated by many, but some also read it as oppressive or forced; surgeons like him had all of the power. The jokes coming from those whose job it was to make these men look “normal” – jokes in which they visualized the tube pedicle to make fun of it – jars with the in-group-creating humor that the men crafted themselves, in which the tube pedicle remained an un-visualized tool for lighthearted funny stories.
And yet, the hierarchies of joking were not as straightforward as this short analysis suggests. Though the Guinea Pigs’ humor helped solidify their in-group from a position of less power in the hospital, for example, they also joked at the expense of women who worked there, something that often veered into coercion or assault. Jokes about the Guinea Pigs’ own sexual prowess and virility – which were framed as helping these men to gain back some of the masculinity that they felt they lost through their injuries and disfigurements – made the women around them the victims of jokes, instead of the men and their disabilities. Once again, the positionality, and the power relations, of the joker and the subject of the joke is of immense importance: who is made superior, or inferior, through the joke’s telling? This is especially key to consider when the humor is at the expense of someone whose disability, visible difference, or gender means that they are frequently pushed into an out-group, rather than being “in” on the joke.
Christine Slobogin is an art historian of medicine and Assistant Professor of Health Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester. Her book titled Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper: How Art and Archives Defined Second World War Reconstructive Surgery in Britain, was published in June 2025, and she is the co-editor of Sick Jokes: Visual Histories of Humour, Health and the Body, out from Manchester University Press in September 2026.
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