“And, how is your left buttock, Joe?” I asked one Saturday afternoon, via Zoom.
Joe laughed. “Oh, it’s fine thanks. Still a bit bruised, but….”
“He’s making a fuss about nothing,” said Miranda, his wife, “just to get maximum traction and sympathy.”
“Aren’t you going to ask how my right buttock is?”
“Erm…. I hadn’t planned on it, actually.”
And so, the conversation went on in a light-hearted, jolly sort of way. Before I recount its entirety, I should probably give you a little background information: I was teaching Miranda and Joe Pilates, as I have done every week for nine years. Both Joe and Miranda are London Media Types: they are articulate, always concerned to be right-on, and very charming. Over the years, the line has blurred a little between clients and friends: I have watched their little girl grow up, I have been asked to dinner with Miranda and her mother. Joe has sometimes seen to it that, instead of doing Pilates, we are actually rolling around on the floor clutching our sides as he tells us about the misdoings of his (sometimes rather famous) clients. In this case however, he had fallen over whilst putting the bins out and hurt his bottom, much to the good-natured derision of his wife and daughter.
Why, you may be wondering, am I recounting this lively but seemingly meaningless snatch of conversation? Is this what living in the country has reduced me to? The point is that I distinctly remember how I felt during that conversation. I felt warm and fuzzy inside, because I felt so normal. Here I was joshing with friends – what could be more neurotypical than that? I was joining in, and I was passing muster as someone socially at ease, just because I was joking around.
I have another anecdote for you. This time, I was in the depths of Lincolnshire officiating as bridesmaid at a wedding, resplendent in electric blue. One of the flower girls, Ava, was autistic. She had done a marvellous job getting through our frankly shambolic dress-rehearsal the day before (where the best men turned up at the wrong church and the father of the bride demanded the whole thing be re-choreographed so that he wouldn’t have to walk backwards to his pew). Ava only had one mini meltdown and repeatedly whacked herself in the face with a hassock, which I found completely understandable, given the circumstances. The following morning, we bridesmaids and flower girls bundled ourselves excitedly into the vintage car to be driven to the church. As we pulled away and set off at a stately twenty miles per hour, Ava suddenly sighed and said “well, I only hope that it doesn’t end in divorce.” Cue lots of amused glances and smirks, mine included. I didn’t know that I was autistic then: I spent my time desperately trying to be like other people and not quite understanding why I wasn’t. Ava, to me, was different. I smiled knowingly at my fellow bridesmaids, the smile clearly indicating a sort of “aww, bless” sentiment that I now realise was pretty bloody patronising.
Is autistic humour a tautology? And when neurotypical people laugh, are they laughing with the neurodiverse or at them?
Unfortunately, I would say that humourlessness is a quality rather associated with autistic people. This is unlikely to be due to neurotypical people carefully doing their research, or spending lots of time with autistic people getting to know their ways, or drawing on their own experience interacting with people on the spectrum. It seems to me that we are seen as lacking a sense of humour for this reason: if you asked a random selection of people “What are autistic people like?” most answers would be variations on a theme of unsociability. We are socially inept, awkward, we don’t consider others, we take things too literally, and so on and on. For an outsider looking in, lack of social awareness seems to be a fairly obvious, demonstrable quality of Autism. The neurotypical person looking in may not understand why the autistic person is behaving the way they are; they may not understand anything about how autism works, but they can see with their own eyes that autism equals not socialising in the same way that they do. Humour is a huge part of being thought of as sociable, hence my pleasure at being able to keep up with jokes when I am surrounded by neurotypical people – I feel as though I am succeeding on their terms.
But for the humourless-autie stereotype to become part of the public consciousness, it needs to catch on and be used. That is the point of stereotpyes: they are lazy, unnuanced. They are shortcuts that promise easy understanding of disabilities/cultures/religions that are too complicated to be reduced in this way. The idea of the autistic person not getting the joke has been propagated in film and tv for decades, and this is where humour has traditionally not been kind to Autism. We can all think of a character, sometimes openly autistic, sometimes just an autistic-style person who is never openly named as such, who knows a lot about a lot of things but has zero sense of humour. The super-nerd who takes everything literally, who says “crazy” things because their worldview is just so damn odd. We are encouraged to laugh at these people, and this is where things become problematic.
How often are funny autistic characters written by autistic writers who truly understand where that person is coming from and has sympathy for them? Not very often. How often are these characters represented one-dimensionally, with little care for showing what is actually going on inside them? Taking people literally is a serious problem for most autistic people. It makes us vulnerable, open to mockery. I laugh at many funny films, programmes and comedians, but I find teasing, especially from people I don’t know well, incredibly discombobulating. How am I supposed to know when people are “pulling my leg”? And why should I be laughed at for that?
The tide is starting to turn, in comedy as in many other aspects of life, against laughing at minorities for being different, and for putting words (and jokes) in their mouths. Comedians Joe Wells, Hannah Gadsby and Bethany Black have all spoken about their autism. Comedy writer Sara Gibbs recently published a memoir about her ASD diagnosis. You don’t have to venture far into the online social media communities of autistic people to be struck by the dry wit with which they discuss and navigate their lives. I am no stranger to deadpanning my way out of situations, of using the fact that I see the world differently to make people laugh. But the important thing is that I am in control: it is my choice to use my autistic take on things to get a laugh. My humour exists as part of my Autism, not in spite of it.
In the UK, the term “funny” has two meanings: it is used to mean both the comical and the slightly odd, or strange. As autistic people, don’t we sit in that crossover perfectly? We embody the strange and odd in the best way possible whilst also having a sense of humour forged on acute observation of those around us who are so very different. We are definitely funny people in every sense of the word, and that is something to be celebrated.
