AS and laughter

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My Health professor from this previous May had an autistic son, and we ended up talking for a couple hours after class (about trail-hiking, Weather Channel meteorologists, and the ESRB video game rating system). I noticed that he (like me) also laughs breathing in instead of breathing out.

I also noticed that one of my neighbors, who is undiagnosed but clearly (to me, anyways) on the spectrum (very smart, scatterbrained; rocks incessantly in the pews at church) does the same. I was wondering if this is a regular occurrence among people on the spectrum or if it was just sampling error.

I think there should be a choice for both. When I laugh really hard I'll breath in. When it's something mildly funny it will be out. I think because when it's mildy funny, my laugh is a little forced. Still I voted out.

Laugh-In topic

Ah, Rowan and Martin! Definitely In.

I can't laugh while breathing in.

I don't remember how I laugh. I was told I laugh literally though. As in I laugh saying "ha ha" and apparently that's not natural.

I do both.

Well, you learn something every day. I didn't know that it was possible to laugh when breathing in.

Vanilla_Slice

I had no idea too, but it turns out that I do. Maybe that explains why when I laugh too much it hurts?

A Laugh-In reference. Excellent! Either you found them on YouTube or you are as old as me and actually remember people popping out of boxes to make jokes.

Janissy wrote:

My mother wouldn't let us say " You bet your sweet bippy" because she said it sounded like a part of a woman's anatomy and I had no idea what she meant.

i laugh out.

i think i have heard people laughing in. they have all been women.

there is one lady at work who (when she laughs) sounds like she is gasping for breath, and she shrieks "yeeek yeeek yeeek" with an inward breathing engagement of her vocal chords.

it would make me cough to imitate her way of laughing.

i rarely laugh in a "ha ha ha" way except when i am in "out of control laughter", and that is usually when i am not allowed to laugh. at those times, i laugh the last ounce of breath out of my lungs, and i can not inhale again because i am still trying to laugh out, and the vocal sound disappears because my breath is gone but my diaphragm is still in a convulsive contraction.
sometimes i think i know what is meant by "to laugh one's self to death". sometimes i feel i will go unconscious before i can take a breath and return from a laughter fit.

usually i do not laugh, but i see things that others find laughable as mildly amusing and i say "psssssssssssss....." in a breathy way with a feeble smile.

b9 wrote:

me too-much of what people find screamingly funny is only mildly amusing to me. That applies even when I'm the one making the (I think) mildly amusing comment.

lol! My stepdad always said, "You bet your sweet bippy!" and I had no idea where it came from. Mystery solved. And I agree with your mother...even as a kid it always disturbed be because I wondered what a sweet bippy was...and it didn't sound good.

As for the original topic, my 6yo son with AS has a laugh that sounds forced. But he does it when something is genuinely funny to him, so I don't think it is actually forced....if that makes any sense whatsoever.

An undefined suggestive word was the point of it. People would just fill in whatever would horrify them as the meaning if they wanted to be horrified, demonstrating that people choose to be offended.

I trained myself to laugh and smile so people would know when I liked things, it took having a girlfriend to actually care enough about making sure I laughed at everything I found funny and smiled at everything I enjoyed because she got so happy seeing evidence of me happy that I couldn't help but want to do it, and now it is such a reflex I'm not even sure if I could turn it back off assuming I for some reason wanted to.

Facial manipulation has always been an important part of my humor, people have always really enjoyed it. It helped me develop facial musculature control, which I use to try and emote my emotional state some, but most of the time I prefer to just leave it as I'm either smiling, laughing, or neutral. I'm still horrible at reading emotion in others. Well, I take that back, I'm horrible at reading the emotion they want me to react to. I can read a whole bunch of emotional content, but I never know what stuff I'm supposed to acknowledge I can read in them, so I just pretend I don't see any of it. Except laughing, I know what laughing means.

I think my only naturally emoted states are degrees of contemplative, which gets misread as degrees of about to eat my children somehow, I guess unfamiliarity with seeing people that think about stuff. *Ba-Dum-Pshh* So I trained myself to laugh both in and out. Ahhh-Haaah Ahhh-Haahaaahaaa type thing. The funny thing is right from the beginning of teaching myself to have a laugh it felt natural like it was actually my laugh, I just had to teach myself when to use it because the connection between things that are laugh worthy and thing that laughs was missing.

i do not usually find what others see as funny as funny to me, so i am usually a non participant in the ring of regular smilers.

i breathe in when something is really funny. and when i'm laughing hard no can tell if i'm laughing or crying. lots of gasping involved. it doesn't help that my tear ducts are set off by anything even slightly amusing.

if something's only a little funny, i breathe out. and i really had to think about this to answer. it seems weird that i never considered this before.