I made people laugh in school and college. A few times around age 18 I commanded a couple of classrooms like like a standup. It seems to be what people remember about me. “Does your new boss get your humor?” my old friend Jon asked recently. Humor has always been my lubricant.
“You’ve always been funny, Jeffrey,” my late mother said once. “Well not funny, you know, but witty.” Mum’s kind of compliment.
My kids are funny. My 13-year-old son Ned is in a stand-up class. )“Can’t imagine where he gets it,” Jon said.) Jill and I sure thought Alex was funny about 10 years ago when Ned stood in our dining room crying and crying. Alex heard his little brother’s wails, walked straight up, looked Ned in the face and hit him on top of the head.
Or that time years before that, when Alex still hadn’t said many words and lived in a crib. I was fiddling with his diaper when the tape broke and I muttered “dammit.” Soon, his tiny knuckles gripping the crib railing with excitement, Alex spoke another early word; it rhymed with “spammit.”
On our last trip to Cape Cod – what’s shaping up as our last vacation ever as a complete family – the daytime temp one day was 30 degrees chillier than the day before. When the sea air slapped Alex as he dashed onto the beach, he spun around and demanded, “Car? Car!”
Witty boy. Though strapped by being only semi-verbal, he comes out with some straight-talking humor. “Tired! Take a nap!” he snapped one bedtime. Once when he wanted saltines and all we had was pretzels and I said, “How about pretzels?” he replied, “How about crackers?”
In most of his baby pictures, Alex is smiling around the breathing tubes. “Jeez he’s a happy little guy,” my brother commented.
Now almost 16, Alex still laughs a lot – loud, too, about five feet from us in the living room. Laughing and whooping at some “Sesame Street” skit on his iPad before he stomps the floor or plunges to his haunches for a joke only he understands and doesn’t share. His laughter seems unconnected to anything in our world. Maybe I just say that because he’s almost 16 and busting up over Elmo.
Autism is a long search for something funny. The Kansas City Star reports on parents of autistic kids doing standup: “Several area parents, coached by local comics, practiced routines about the humorous side of living with autistic kids,” the story reads. One mom’s “boob joke” involves her 11-year-old son, a nearby McDonalds and a woman’s low-cut top. “Except it was more than just a joke. It’s one of the many frustrating, and often humorous, realities parents have to deal with when living with a child ‘on the spectrum’.
“The disorder often impairs judgment over what’s socially acceptable.”
Hoo yes. Bolting from our apartment comes to mind. Barging into other people’s homes, leading us on a chase through echoing, dusty stairwells. Alex hasn’t done that in ages, of course, not since Super Bowl Sunday last month. Did I mention our last vacation as a family? There’s a humorous side?
“People with autism just process the world a little differently,” a therapist told the Star. (The story is at http://www.kansascity.com/2014/02/24/4846885/whats-so-funny-plenty-for-parents.html .) This therapist initiated the idea of parents of the autistic doing standup “then got comedians to help focus their material and hone their delivery.”
I’m trying. At Alex’s IEP meeting where everyone introduced themselves – “Hi. I’m (blank) and I’m Alex’s teacher”; “Hi, I’m (blank) and I’m Alex’s physical therapist” – and when my turn came my delivery was fine. “Hi, I’m Jeff Stimpson and I’m Alex’s lawyer.” They all laughed. (When they stopped laughing one rep from the Department of Education looked at me and asked, “Are you really a lawyer?”)
“We should start doing the following things with the boys immediately,” I emailed Jill a few months ago. “1. Make the boys wipe up their own spills. No exceptions! 2. Make the boys sweep up their own cookie crumbs. No exceptions! 3. Make the boys take their own dishes into the kitchen after dinner. NO EXCEPTIONS!” If that email isn’t a joke, I don’t know what is.
Regarding focused material, “retard” is out in any form or context. These days I try to forget every “drain bamage” joke I ever made.
“Oh you’re German!” Basil Fawlty tells visitors to the Towers. “I thought something was wrong with you.”
“My own taste in humour has changed since having … a special-needs child,” says the New Zealand mom who writes the blog Autism and Oughtisms (http://autismandoughtisms.wordpress.com/2010/12/26/humorless-and-humorous-autism/). “Jokes about friends acting as if they’re intellectually disabled or have had brain damage used to seem like harmless fun. (Now) it can feel quite insidious coming from someone without personal experience and understanding of what they’re laughing at.
“My husband and I regularly make (rather un-repeatable) joking comments to each other, about what we have to put up with each day due to our son’s autism,” she adds. “Chances to laugh while you’re going through the problems are as good as non-existent … and the laughter often seems to carry a sort of desperate exhaustion.”
Jill and I prefer resigned irony as we watch Alex sweep somebody else’s stuff off a table or the hutch to make room for precise rows of his plastic jungle animals. “Autism decorates,” says Jill, sweeping cookie crumbs off her couch. Autism makes you hone a lot. I can make Alex laugh but I don’t think he gets my humor. He understands my tone of voice but not what I say. Doesn’t matter. When he squats on the floor, bites his own arm, bolts or rocks the couch until it shakes apart, there’s nothing to laugh at anyway.
