Another Stereotype?

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The media gets many things wrongly but they do researches every now and then and they correct the mistakes, in fact there are a couple of series airing right now that got it right.
Have you watched the big bang theory, the it crowd or bones all those series have characters with as who do jokes that all the other characters cant understand and they dont usually understand other characters jokes, a few years ago none of these series existed so I believe things are starting to change taking into account that at the start of the century the closest they got it was rain man/melvin and neither of those characters was intended to seem aspie.

On a side note most peopel nowadays are wise enough not to believe everything that the news say they can manipulate information and so.

My son loves to say silly words to try and make us laugh. He will also laugh at silly noises. I think he does have a sense of humor too, but like Willaful said, I really don't always get what is so funny!

i think hand flapping would only be a stereotype if it was considered that ALL autistics hand flap. not all do, nor is it required as a diagnostic trait. but it is a common trait in autistics.

the lack of humor was something i found curious. for an entire decade ive been telling my SO he has no sense of humor. then we figured out he is autistic, and it explains things a lot. its not that he has no sense of humor, but rather he completely doesnt get MY sense of humor. i prefer sarcastic/ironic humor, and when i say something meant to be a joke, he interprets it literally and completely misses the sarcasm or irony in the statement. 99% of the time he tries to correct or refute what ive said, and then i have to tell him it was a joke.

our youngest son has the same issues with humor. he has an interesting sense of humor and a great laugh, but he cant get it unless its obvious. we dont allow much teasing with him simply because he either gets confused or takes it seriously. ive seen him nearly burst into tears, and hes not really a crier, because his dad teased he was going to leave without him to go swimming.

i find the literal translations to be the biggest issue with interpreting humor in my house.

I hand flap, and I'm thirty nine. But I try not to do it in public.

I love TBBT, but Sheldon isn't shown to have a sense of humor either. Or at least not that I've gotten.

the only time when i was little that i hand flapped was when i was about maybe 11 or so and someone showed me that stup trick saying there wrist was made out of rubber and I got obsessed with it and was flapping my hands on purpose just to see my hands look like rubber

I dont get most jokes either but he jokes every now and then.
Just look at the pilot he has a joke on the board mocking some theory and he mentions it to peny as if it was something important.
He even has his own catch phrase bazinga(it only appears on episodes of the 3rd season but it shows that they are making an effort into creating a more believable character) that he says everytime hes doing a joke. There are plenty of videos of sheldon jokes on youtube, just type in bazinga and you should find some.

I did, and you are right! I haven't seen season 3 yet and am so looking forward to it!

Sorry I supossed you had already watched all the episodes.

There are a few jokes pre-season 3(the one I mentioned is on chapter 1 season 1 and the only episode prior to that one was the pilot they dropped out) but the writers only realized sheldon potential at the end of season 2.

One of the many, many reasons I love my son in all his spectrum-ness: his grandmother bought him a joke book of 1001 jokes. He of course read it cover to cover several times, and now due to his "disability" will randomly insert an astutely-appropriate-to-the-situation joke into nearly every conversation. It's a delight.

I thought most parents would enjoy knowing that not everyone thinks like the media and that the leading expert on as thought differently.

As a child I loved doing jokes, I get a great feeling when Im helping people and everyone seemed to love it whenever I did them. On first grade of highschool my maths teacher interrupted the class because all the other teachers had heard a joke from me and she hadnt, thats when I decided it had to stop.

I did one of the insert a random-yet-appropiate-related-to-a-class-I-took joke sometime ago at a lunch with some classmates. At first everyone thougth it was somewhat wierd, after I explained I was joking things got a lot better and we still laugh at the whole thing every now and then.

I think, at least with my son, this is a great exemplar of how wonderful the positives of the spectrum can be: it's as though his brain highlights a keyword, key concept, or visual (I remember once he did a squirrel joke after we were all looking at one out the window) unconsciously selects the most appropriate joke out of all 1001 in the blink of an eye (sometimes we get a series; the times that delight me most the jokes in the series are related tangentially in a way that still makes sense, but they aren't related directly to each other.) I have no idea of the dynamics of what really goes on in his head, but it's an amazing gift.

Joke-telling may go away for a bit during the stress of the school year, but next time we get a good joke string going, I'll try to post it here.

I'm 28 and I flap my hands when I am extremely excited. Normally I have a degree of control over this, but this just ends with my joints locked and my arms shaking a bit. But this is normally when I am very giddy and excited and in my comfort zone, AKA my room. My hands also kind of wrap around themselves as well when I am excited, I think it's part of the hand flapping thing.

I was thinking, this is really where the stereotype seems wrong. My son did it when he was excited. An autistic blogger wrote that she did it when she was happy. The stereotype is that it's an anxiety behavior. Which may also be true for some people, I guess.

Ohh....I sometimes crack my hands a little, so I guess it's similar, then...

I was at a big Christian festival last weekend with my son, and we met another boy who flapped his hands in exactly the same way as my son!

We were in a lift when I spotted him, on a floor we weren't intending to get out at, but after seeing him standing there looking at the lift and flapping, we made our way back to that floor. I watched him for a while and worked out who his father was, and eventually plucked up the courage to speak to this boy's father. He told me that both his sons are on the Spectrum, and are very different from each other. The "flapper" attends a special school now, where he is happy and has friends. The older boy is much more quiet, doesn't flap and attends mainstream school.

Of the three boys, including my son, he and the other flapper were immediately obviously autistic, but the other, quieter boy wasn't. On a meeting of only a few minutes he seemed like a quiet, shy child, but no doubt if I had spent more time with him I would have been able to detect his particular traits.

Not really sure why I'm posting this, other than that I was quite excited to meet another boy who flapped like my son (I had a wee flap myself with the thrill of it!) and that while flapping is a very visible trait, it is only one of many and those three boys were all very different from each other in many ways.