Funny, You Don't Look Autistic: A Comedian's Guide to Life on the Spectrum

by Michael McCreary

Why did I have to learn how to be polite and respectful when other kids didn’t?

Coached by my parents, I developed a friendly, small-town manner. Only that was the problem: friendly and polite had gone out of style.

It was always a heartbreaking thing to learn secondhand that people—people who I thought liked me—were actually messing with my mind. And as time went on, it started to really put me at odds with others. I wasn’t sure who I could trust.

then in grade seven, something changed. Other kids with ASD started coming to my school.

“Not for long, you sonofabitch,” I actually muttered to myself.

I figured out that people don’t usually change if you put bananas in their desks. When they change is if you help them see the other as a human being.

I felt I could more easily disappear and not have to stick out the way I did before. But alas, I am a performer. Not to mention, my vigilante impulses were starting to come back in an unexpected way.

The Hub was like an autistic Batcave. It had the best model train sets, the worst 1990s anime, and the most passive-aggressive educational assistants. It had everything!

It’s important to stand up to authority when it’s corrupt, but it’s also important to understand how it became corrupt in the first place, so you can better reason with them.

In my experience, many students with ASD are inclined to work harder when you can collaborate with them and tailor a program to their skill set.

in every group I found myself in, one person in that group would hate me.

just a quiet sigh when I walk in the room, or an eye roll every time I open my mouth to say something. Just a little something to let me know they can’t stand me.

But with an ASD mind, you’re always trying to solve problems. When you see a problem, you fixate on it and try to resolve

It’s not even so much that you want to be liked; it’s that you want to be understood by other people. And if your efforts at being understood are futile, then what’s the point?

certain percentage of the people you encounter are always going to hate you, and for no particular reason. It’s going to be a constant through your life. Once you come to grips with this knowledge, it’s liberating.

a genetically engineered android, called a replicant, is taken into a room and asked a series of questions designed to tell robots from humans. The questions are meant to stimulate an emotional response, and if the replicant doesn’t respond in the correct way, they’ll be executed.

it took me back to a time when I was also being asked questions intended to provoke an emotional response and scared of getting the answers wrong because I just wasn’t wired that way

I identified with the replicants, the robots who were being interrogated and hunted down. To me, the movie was about people being persecuted because they didn’t fit a conventional neurological model.

Blade Runner taught me true empathy. It also taught me how to read a film.

As someone with autism, I need closure. I need a concrete understanding that if we plan to meet somewhere at a certain time, it’s going to happen, and that if you need to cancel, you’ll notify me as early as possible.

Cell phones can make people feel that it’s fine to cancel plans at the last minute.

It took me a while to learn this, but I finally realized that the people who matter are the ones who make time for you.

Friendship is deeper than having mutual interests. Friendship is setting aside time in your day to help someone forget about life for a while.

Literal language means exactly what it says. Figurative language, on the other hand, paints word pictures and allows us to “see” a point. It uses similes, metaphors, and hyperbole to describe something, often by comparing it to something different. Figurative language is great for poetry, but not so easy for people on the spectrum.

“Were they serious?” is a recurring thought of mine.

“Life’s too short to be a chore.” It’s never too late to fix things, I told myself.

If you’re getting too much sensory input, stimming can help block it out. Or it can provide extra sensory input when it’s needed.

asking an autistic person not to stim can end up causing more problems than the stim itself.

Routine means everything for us autistic folk, and breaking from it can be quite stressful.