AS, talking and humour.

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I have diagnosed AS but I've had comments like "you talk more than someone with AS would" or "you have humour; people with AS don't have humour"...

I can make jokes because I learn from TV/other people/school/university/work/etc that when someone says something and other people laugh at it, it is funny. Then I go home and I mull over it and work out the humour. Then I start using the joke myself and people find it funny. I often have a delay between hearing other people's jokes and me finding it funny.

Also I like talking to people I know, and I do talk to people I know at length sometimes. How does that make me non-AS? Besides I more often than not talk about my special interests...

How do I deal with comments like the above? It is making me feel like people think I am an inposter, that I'm making it up, when I am not. And having a psychotic illness as well makes my paranoia really bad when people say this to me; I start thinking that they're going to beat me up or kill me.....

treat those hostile people like the barking dogs whose behaviors they emulate. i am AS and i had to learn to develop a sense of humor just to cope with life. there are few things on earth that aren't just a little sweeter with some good humor to leaven them.

Doesn't sound like hostile people to me.
Just regular people who have their own good points and not-so-good points.
I think they were trying to offer a complement by mentioning how 'regular' you are as a person (in a good way).

They probably don't realise that chatting at length about your own special interests it is a typical aspie trait ; they probably view any conversational ability, especially because you are probably not linguistically challenged, as a qualification for being neurotypical.

However if you can follow conversations with chaotic changes of topic that jumps all over the place, all about things you don't know anything about, and you can still contribute actively to those randomly-changing conversations, then you are really doing well.

Some of the most conversationally-awkward people, people who use one-word answers, phonetically passive people, making me do all the work to break the silence, have been neurotypicals.

Last edited by Chris71 on 21 Jun 2012, 8:31 am, edited 1 time in total.

Thanks.

Auntblabby, I can relate - developing a sense of humour is a way to survive.

Chris71 - I still have great difficulty following conversations that change and jump about a lot. I still struggle with many day-to-day things but humour helps me.

Lots of people with AS have a sense of humor.

I suspect the less humor we have as aspies the closer we approach depression. So let's all just have one big laugh as we see NTs taking life far too seriously.

I'm not sure about this whole humor thing.
I have humor, albeit caustic.
I like irony...

Other kind of jokes mean nothing to me, though.

I was told 20 years ago by a phschologist I couldn't have AS as I have a sense of humour. He was wrong.

I don't think very many NTs find every instance of every kind of humor funny. Everyone who thinks that some successful comedy or another isn't funny can't be an Aspie...

Exactly, hence the reason I'm not sure about this whole humor business.
We do know Asperger's results in different characteristics for different people, so...

As a kid our dad observed us watching tv, and he noticed me laughing at some points, while my two siblings laughed together at other points. Clearly we have humour, it might just be abit different.

I quote lines from movies and television often. I use my own, too. I'm lucky in some ways because although I'm an Aspie, I'm also Irish, so I have a little of the wit.

I looked up a few studies on this.

The most interesting one was [Andrea C. Samson and Michael Hegenloh's "Stimulus Characteristics Affect Humor Processing in Individuals with Asperger Syndrome", ]

This study tested different types of jokes depending on the sort of processing required to understand them to evaluate the influence of the ability to process specific types of information (i.e. "mind reading", social context, etc.) as a factor in humor.

It found that there was no AS-NT difference with regard to humor in general, only to types to specific types of humor that require types of information that are difficult to for people with AS to process to understand. [I suspect this is why a joke by someone with AS can be funny to an NT but not always the reverse)

Another recent study [Viktoria Lyons and Michael Fitzgerald, "Humor in Autism and Asperger Syndrome"] which was more receptive of an overall humor link, suggested that more intellectual types of humor (and especially puns and grammatical or philosophical humor) were kinds that people with AS were good at and noted that these are often associated with people with high linguistic or mathematical abilities.