Humor.

A FaceBook friend sent me this link yesterday.  I'd responded that the home page and second page strike me as pretty purely dead-on.  My friend's response to that was that "Certainly made me feel uncomfortable, which is probably the point. :)"

It's an interesting statement which can be read from a couple of angles.  

Do I think that the makers of this film intend to make you uncomfortable?  Are they rudely trying to take you to a place where you are made to feel that you don't belong?  No.


Are they trying to show you something of the daily discomfort faced by people who live their lives with ASD every day?  Yes.  Does that make you uncomfortable?  Welcome to my world.  Let's talk about empathy.


Tom Stoppard, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, says -

"All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it's like being ambushed by a grotesque."

That's about as NT as NT gets in my book.  Truth?  Let's shove that to the corner of our eye.  We'll gloss it over.  Throw it to the periphery.  Do what we can to avoid facing it.  That woman with her face in the mashed potatoes?  What woman?  (Face is an interesting concept, on multiple levels.)

Oscar Wilde has said -

"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you."

I've mentioned before that I think that he has this just about completely backwards.  As far as I can tell, if you want to make people laugh, you can simply tell them the truth.  Most people spend so much time avoiding the truth that if you put it in front of them, make them face it, nudge it into outline, they'll assume you must be joking.  I guess it's easier to make a joke of suffering than it is to face it.

One of my first encounters with the idea of ASD behaviors came in the mid-90's via a New York Times article.  In the article, there was mention of a man that was having workplace difficulties because of his Asperger's.  The article went on to relate an anecdote about the time the guy was in a meeting at work.  His boss put forth some numbers which were incorrect.  The guy corrected his boss.  This didn't go down too well.

After the meeting, it was said, the gentleman's co-workers took him aside, explained that he was correct, but told him not to do that in the future.  As a work around to the guy's disability, they'd worked out a simple set of clear signals (kick his foot under the table, something like that) to let the guy know when the truth is inappropriate.

That?  That's nuts.