#long story short; hannah gadsby is very funny and ezra klein did not appreciate it enough!!!

[electriccenturies]

brains?

It's a couple years old now but I'm listening to an episode of vox conversations with Hannah Gadsby as the guest, and it's fucking weird to listen to as a late diagnosed autistic person who is perpetually figuring out what parts of me are Normal™. She keeps doing this half clarification / half joke thing that is so familiar to me, and the host so clearly Does Not Find It Funny (or possibly doesn’t know if it’s a joke or not and is scared to laugh?). It'll be like:

Hannah: My mum was the cleaner at the local golf course— golf club, she didn’t clean the course.

*silence*

Hannah (laughing): It’s made of dirt, that’s a silly job.

*no response*

And it suddenly occurred to me that other people maybe don’t think that way? Like, idk about Hannah, but for me I filter through all the possible interpretations of things, not just the contextually correct one, and it leads to puns and little jokes, but also leads me to get SO FUCKING STRESSED about being misinterpreted and wanting to be very, very precise. So I have to make jokes like that — compulsively, at a frequency that annoys people — both to point out the humour of how it could be interpreted, and so that people wont think I’m a total fool.

But now I feel like a lot of NT people might not see those funny literal mental pictures in that way? With the example above, I understood what she meant but I also pictured her mother cleaning the actual golf course and found it funny. Meanwhile, Ezra seemed to either not understand that it was a joke, or not think it warranted even a polite laugh.

Idk if this will make sense — and maybe this is how everybody thinks and I just can’t control my urge to say it in the end — but here is kind of how I understand idioms in a way that leads to comedy (using “fly on the wall” as an example bc it’s easy to see where the idiom comes from and the literal and figurative lines of thinking both end in a funny things, so you end up with a double joke):

And genuinely nobody finds it as funny as I do, but I have to say it. I have no other response and I think it’s neat! I do it in real time, I am quick! But it really does lead me to pointless stress, which is why I started thinking about if other people think like that in the first place — because maybe I stress for NOTHING.

I had a conversation with an internet stranger yesterday where I talked about being ace/sex-repulsed and then later said “I think my gender is turned off”, and now I’m worried that it came across as related to asexuality rather than power switches. Not even a big deal, and like I said, it was a total stranger I’ll probably never talk to again anyway, but it still upsets me that I wasn’t clearer. That is why every single tweet, tumblr post, and reddit comment I make gets a solid 30-45 minutes of editing for clarity before posting. I need people to know exactly what I mean.

But maybe people would simply not think of those interpretations? They don’t necessarily seem to, but then again, maybe they just don’t bring it up because it’s obvious what is meant and it’s not relevant. Or maybe they don’t find it funny. Maybe Ezra did not even think to interpret “cleaner at the golf course” that way.

It is so confusing because my brain is NORMAL to me. I cannot tell and I don’t want to be the obnoxious “DAE?” person lmfao.

It would make me a little sad if NT people actually do think this way and simply don’t like hearing it, tbh :(