Do you have trouble realizing when someone is joking?

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oh, yeah, i have this problem sometimes.
once, when i was working at mcdonalds, someone said he wanted a hundred hamburgers and i laughed and said, "right, you must be real hungry." but my manager said sometimes people want those for a party and i should ring it up.
and then another customer who heard the conversation said he wants a hundred hamburgers and two hundred fries and i went to ring it on the cash register, and the manager grabbed my hand and told the customer, whom i realized he knew at that moment because he called him by name, "you cant joke with this girl because she'll ring it up. she doesnt know it's a joke."
my niece said you know when people joke because of their facial expression and the tone of their voices, but i cant catch it.

Sometimes. I seem to miss it a lot with my husband and boss. I can catch jokes online like on here. I caught sarcasm in someone's reply to my post yesterday mocking peoples ignorance about entitlement and that poster was actually agreeing with what I said. I have gotten better at picking up sarcasm and jokes but I still miss it. I even had a health nutritionist coming over to my home during my pregnancy and we cook healthy food together, she had a sense of humor and I would take it all seriously and my husband told her she can't joke with me because I am literal.

When I was a kid I always thought everybody meant everything they said. I still have trouble with deadpan humor.

For example, I sent out an email with a misspelled word in it at work, where I do a lot of proofreading. The very intimidating President of the company got the email for some reason, and replied with the misspelled word highlighted and "sp". I got embarrassed and sent out an email with the misspelled word corrected. Then months later when I was cleaning out my email box I saw it again and...

I cannot. Especially if they are being serious or acting like they normally do.

Ooohhhh my goodness gracious, do I EVER! I've always had problems discerning "kidding" from seriousness, ever since I was little. My stepfather is one of those guys who simply LOVES to kid around, and when he first started dating my mom, he found it hilarious that I fell for everything he told me. Now that I'm 21, he still loves kidding around with me, but now I can kinda tell when he's kidding or being serious. I still get confused every now and then, tho.

Several of my stepdad's brothers are like that, too, which is also fun. I'm glad that at least my mom and my aunt, grandma and grandpa on my stepdad's side of the family make sense.

I also had a math tutor during my middle school and high school years who loved kidding around, too, and I had the same problems with that as I did with my stepfather. It was a bit harder with my math tutor bcuz some of the things he said to "kid around" got kind of personal, but I learned to sort of ignore those. After awhile, I even got so I could "return his fire" a little bit. There was this one time when he noticed me getting nervous (I think it was when he was looking at a printout of my grades for that week), and he commented, "Do you have a handkerchief you can wring in your hands, if you're that nervous?" And I smiled and said, "No, but there's tissues in the bathroom - would those work just as well?"

I have trouble seeing the joke when people tell it very seriously. My boybriend says things and looks very serious and then he starts to smile or he has to tell me it was a joke.

Sometimes I get it but often it takes me a bit longer than other people.

I'm often not sure if someone is joking or not unless it's obvious. I am aware of the possibility of it. So I actually try to read the air or other clues to see if it's a joke or not. Such situations are very uncomfortable and make me nervous. So I often kill the joke by being very tense and making other people comfortable, too.

I had a good example of this happen just today at work.

I'm a cashier at a convenience store. Two guys came in to day, one guy got a few items, then his friend came up to the counter with his items. They said the items were to be rung up together in one order. All during the transaction they were joking and kidding around, which is fine and I was going along in the same vein. When I informed them of the total amount, the first guy told me that he had already given me $20 to cover his items. I paused and got very uncomfortable because I couldn't recall if he had given to me or not -- the store had been very busy all day and I was tired. I kinda paused and looked at the guy's face. He was being very sincere and insisting he had already paid. I then told him that there was a way I could check the register to see if he had indeed already given me the money. When I said that, he laughed and slid a $20 across the counter to me.

I'm not sure if I should have known what he was up to. Was he kidding around from the beginning and I missed the clues? Or was he really trying to put one over on me, and when he found out I could double-check he backed off? He laughed the whole situation off, but it made me feel awkward and stupid because I didn't know. Not asking for advice or answers to the above questions....I'm just musing over whether an NT would have been able to tell if the guy was kidding or really trying to rip me off.

Once I have a handle on the person's sense of humor, I can usually tell if they're being serious or not in the future. But sometimes I have still trouble seeing through sarcasm. It's always embarrassing when you're the only one in the group who's not sure if you're suppose to be laughing.

I've learned to get better with my "recoveries" though (i.e. making up an excuse as to why I laughed when I wasn't suppose to).