The politics of joking: narratives of humour and joking among adults with Asperger’s syndrome

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyse how humour and narratives about humour are used in a natural group of adults with Asperger’s syndrome. Narratives about humour and use of humour in the group are analysed from a discursive psychological perspective, informed by insights from both disability studies and critical autism studies. The setting of the research is ethnographic fieldwork in an educational setting in Sweden. In the paper, I show the use of three storylines among a natural group of people with autism (PWA) when talking about humour: the storyline of humourless PWA that dominates within Swedish society; and two alternatives, a storyline of alternative humour among PWA and another storyline in line with the social model of disability, of neurotypical humour or disabling humour. When invoking these two alternative storylines, PWA challenge both the humourlessness storyline and the lack of social accessibility within mainstream neurotypical settings.

Keywords:

• joking
• neurotypical humour
• Asperger humour
• Asperger’s syndrome
• social accessibility
• disability humour
• disabling humour

Notes

1. For a brief introduction, see Joyce Davidson’s ‘Workshop Objectives’ at the Critical Autism Studies 2010 Workshop. http://www.joycedavidson.com/criticalautismstudies/?page_id=2 (accessed 7 December 2010). See also Silverman (2008) for an overview of the closely related ‘social studies of autism’.

2. A Folk High School is a type of school for adults, common in the Nordic countries.

3. This year there was an unusually high percentage of female students. Previous cohorts were dominated by male students, which is more in line with the common gender distribution among PWA.

4. ‘Systemet’ (the System) is slang for Systembolaget, the Swedish state-run company that has a monopoly on the legal sale of alcohol in Sweden.