Comedy on the Spectrum: An Interview with Aspergers Are Us

In this interview I talk with Noah Britton, Jack Hanke and Ethan Finlan, three members of Asperger's Are Us, a comedy troupe based in Massachusetts comprised of four individuals with Asperger's. The fourth member, ‘New’ Michael Ingemi, joined the interview just as we were wrapping up. Since its first description by Hans Asperger, many clinicians have suggested that Asperger's is characterized by deficits in humour comprehension. This view has been challenged by V. Lyons and M. Fitzgerald but there is still surprisingly little empirical literature on the topic, and this myth seems to persist despite much anecdotal evidence to the contrary. I would suggest that the very existence of Asperger's Are Us undermines that persistent myth.

In our discussion the group talk about their sense of humour, how it might differ from that of a neurotypical person and what they think about popular representations of the condition. Furthermore, I would suggest that their views, and their work more generally, are best understood as being at the intersection between the neurodiversity movement and what Reid et al. call ‘disability humour’. That is, humour that ‘provides non-disabled audiences an opportunity to learn that the problem is not the impairment per se, but the attitude and structures that render the impairment disabling’3