It's a joke! Don't you get it?

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Theory: That might mean you sense of humor is very refined, so you only find a portion of things humorous, but people find you humorous as 1. Your jokes are more liking to be found humorous by everyone as you aim at the middle ground of humor 2. You might say something that other people find humorous without realizing.

I'm not saying most aspies have refined senses of humor, many have senses of humor that most people seem to lack.

I think this is funny, because it is true.

I think that second phrase applies to me more than the first phrase, because a small subset of people find my humor hilarious, while the large majority find my humor not to be humor at all, but weird and incomprehensible, as I find most of their humor.

Yeah you offended the bejeezus out of me, I think I've lost all respect for you, gah...

Ah, I see, the way you worded your post made you look like the first case. Yeah, you just have a weird sense of humor.

I sometimes miss humour.
I sometimes see humour in something that nobody else does.
I sometimes misinterpret humour and come back with a suitably witty riposte only to find that most people really, really do live on a different planet to me and have a very different sense of humour.
I sometimes find my own internal dialogue far more interesting than anything going on around me and will grin to myself like an idiot.
I sometimes use humour in situations that really do not call for humour.



Same with sarcasm.



But on the plus side, I did learn maths well.

That happened to me a lot when I was younger. I had a few typical peers who treated me that way.

I have a good sense of humour and this has always made me doubt my Aspergers diagnosis. I remember reading somewhere about why we react to humour and it made perfect sense to me. It is like your mind 'hiccups' when it recognises an error. Think about every joke you have heard or funny thing you have seen and there will be a deviation from what your brain expects to be the next logical step. Here is an article titled "Why our brains make us laugh" http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2011/1 ... story.html

I'm an Aspie......I laugh quite a lot, therefore I have a sense of humour.

I get most jokes, I laugh at them sometimes. A lot of jokes just don't seem funny to me though....they seem too weak somehow. I also laugh when people try to pull the wool over my eyes in a way that's so obvious that I can tell exactly what they're up to. I laugh whenever I see the human race exposed for the competitive liars they mostly are. I laugh when I hear of people doing futile things and when people are quite clearly going the wrong way about something. I guess I laugh a lot at people when they do stuff that belongs to the world I've rejected. I laugh when I see people chain-smoking cigarettes. I laugh at those "fanny-magnet-toys-for-the-boys" cars that young men buy, the ones that look like little spaceships. I suppose a lot of my humour is black, but a simple humorous image or idea can also raise a giggle.

A close Aspie friend of mine has often failed to laugh at my jokes. "Story" jokes fall flat practically every time. Simply sharing a wacky idea about the material of the current conversation often works quite well, and equally often it doesn't, but when it does, it really does.

my initial take on this without reading the thread is that there are so many different delivery mechanisms for jokes. some will be obvious by tone of voice, the surreal or unusual nature of the joke, some will be dead pan and subtle in content but will rely upon you knowing the persons personality and things that fit that.

on top of that, everyone has different levels of awareness, obviously this can vary at any given moment


an interesting topic. i'll read the thread properly later

TBH, more NTs I know have problems understanding context. Unless the people I'm talking about aren't really NTs, just undiagnosed. I always feel like I'm waiting for people to catch up. And when it comes to jokes, if they're not funny to me it's either because I can guess the ending through the middle, or I've already heard it.

I have a great sense of humor, but it's directed at absurdities.
I'm in the group that never ever once thought Stephen Colbert or the Onion were serious news outlets, and was shocked to find that people actually believe them.

In contrast,
I was told by someone the other day that a quip "doesn't have to make sense, it's a joke!"
If the relationship between lame setup A and stupid punchline B is completely unfathomable to me, how can it be called a joke???

That, and people telling me to relax when I continuously ask them to explain a joke to me-
I'm not offended or something, I GENUINELY DON'T GET HOW SOMETHING IS FUNNY.

i am not able to share humor with anyone really.
i often find myself in paroxysms of laughter however, but the reasons for my laughter are almost never apparent to anyone else. sometimes people think i am laughing at their joke when i am actually laughing at the fact that i do not find it funny.

my girlfriend's father has a habit of telling jokes, and i can not pay attention to them because they are like banal saga's to me. "paddy walks into a bar and.....blah blah blah". so what? when he engages me in an intense joke, and he positions himself with his faked funny voice and expects that i am going to find his joke funny, i realize that when the punchline comes, i will not be moved to even smile, and i then imagine the social awkwardness that is going to ensue when he delivers the punchline. that thought starts to "tickle my mind", and he is oblivious to the fact that i am thinking in my own agenda and not even paying attention to his words, and he becomes more and more mirthfully animated as he approaches his punchline.

i, in turn, become more and more "mentally tickled" by my own internal scenario, and i start to laugh even before he delivers the punchline. when i see that "social d-day (the delivery of the punchline) " is imminent, i will burst into laughter and he is derailed with confusion because he thinks i thought he has already delivered the punch line and he says "no no no...i'm not there yet", and i see him back pedaling and trying to regain control of his joke telling sequence, but it is all over for me.

i will laugh until i start coughing, and tears run down my face, but i am in my own private world and i am laughing at the fact that he has gone from a polished comedian (in his mind) to a confused and serious person who thinks i am insane.

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my boss who was named "judy" (when i worked in an office) was a very confident socialite, and she used to get briefed by me before she went into important meetings (my software was often the conduit for her presentation), and on many occasions i became useless to her because i went into spasms of laughter, and she could not bring me back to sensibility. often she spoke to me in a very serious and earnest way, and she gave the impression that "this is make or break", and i started to find the fact that i was not terribly concerned amusing.

an example was one day when she was going over the final details before she entered a meeting, and she was anxious and desperate to establish that everything was perfect.
i noticed that she had scraped her teeth with her lipstick, so i was useless to her after that because i was laughing at the fact that i had no inclination to tell her about it, and i can not really explain what i found funny, but because that was the very worst time to laugh, i could not prevent myself from laughing.

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sometimes when people tell me of extremely sad events that have just happened and they are in a grievous state, i become aware that i must be reverend and act in a serious and compassionate fashion, and i also become aware that "this is no time to smirk", and with that thought, a smirk then grips my face, and it is more powerful than my restraint, and it grows and grows the more i try to suppress it, and when they become disgruntled when they see i am smirking, i realize i have no defense, and that seems even funnier. funerals are not events that i can attend without eliciting disgust. i know it is wrong, but when i know i must not laugh, i laugh at the effort i put into not laughing.

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when police are talking to me, i think "act sober and serious now for gods sake", and then when i see how unwaveringly serious they are, i imagine how they would react if i failed to keep a straight face, and that inculcates a smirk, and then it snowballs when they interrogate me angrily about what i find funny.

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as far as the normal joke telling aspect is concerned, there was once a boy in an adolescent psychiatric unit i was in who used to laugh eagerly at every joke that was told. he was faking laughter, and it was obvious to me that he did not understand the jokes, but he laughed heartily anyway to gain social approval (he was the opposite of me). the closest i came ever to being a "bully" was with that boy (who was my age(14)), and i decided to make up absurd jokes to tell him to see if he laughed at them. i do not think i was bullying him because i never alerted him to the fact that the jokes i was telling him were random sentences i thought up on the spot, so he never felt bad or humiliated. i was just testing him because i was curious.

the fact that he laughed made me laugh, and so it looked to him like the jokes were valid because he thought i was laughing at the funniness of the "joke", when in reality i was laughing at him laughing at random things i made up which were not funny.

example

Q: why did the irishman take his dog for a walk?
A: because the painters used the wrong color on the windowsills.


Q: why did the camel refuse to drink from the sheep's water trough?
A: because sheep can not read.

Q: why did the fly refuse to land on the coal miners dinner table?
A: because it had the wrong type of spectacles on.

(i can make those up continuously forever)

he laughed heartily at every joke, and i also laughed....but i suspect that was not a nice thing to do. i was only 14 at the time.
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whatever. my sense of humor is contained in a vault inside my mind, and no one else shares it or ever has. i have never been able to make anyone else laugh, and i do not care if i can or not. people's disbelief at my stupidity is fuel for my amusement. i am a very isolated and strange person i guess.

this is great, so true!! it happens in life in general I think too, people can be very rude but if I am rude back and stoop to their level and give them a dose of their own medicine, they say "hey, there's no need to be so harsh!"

Probably because they don't know they are being rude nor are intending to be. I am sure people have tried doing that to me and all I thought was they were the mean ones so when I treat them the same back, it was like a cycle.