Published on 12, July, 2020
Or are you like me? Expecting at any moment to be outed as an intellectual fraud. It's an area of high,possibly pathological,insecurity for me. I think it connects to the bullying related trauma. Being treated as a lesser person by my school age contemporaries, especially as a teenager.
I don’t ever feel intelligent, my IQ is higher than most but I struggle in different ways. I’m not very good at reading or writing, that has often made me feel stupid, I can still remember an English teacher laughing at my spelling of quite simple words. I just don’t see words in the same way as most others, I now recognise that it’s most probably dyslexia not stupidity.
I can do things that neurotypical people find quite hard but then I often fail to understand something like a joke and then feel stupid. I suppose there are many different ways to measure cleverness, I just tend to plod on and not worry about other people too much.
Roy said: I often fail to understand something like a joke
I've never been good at that. With a lot of stand up comedians/comediennes I'm thinking 'what's so funny about that?' Ditto a lot of comedy shows.
Roy said:I think I tend to overthink the joke
I tend to do that.
I think I tend to overthink the joke, I’ve suffered from people doing pranks on me before, I always fall for it. I’m most probably too trusting and normally feel hurt afterwards as to why others would want to want to do it to me.
Some comedians are just not funny, then again most are only as funny as the material written for them. I always struggled with the ‘Oxbridge’ ‘Goodies’ and most Monty Python, they didn’t make me laugh, The Young Ones and Not the 9 o’clock news comedy was from the same background but very funny. I love studying people like Ronnie Barker, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. Watching their timing is just amazing.
firemonkey said:I've never told a joke.
I'm not really one for telling jokes either, but in my case it's because I'm hopeless at remembering jokes. I can tell amusing anecdotes, but whether other people consider them amusing is an entirely different matter.
Thank you. Another thing that may be strange, even for here. I've never told a joke.
firemonkey said:I'm struggling to answer
Could I suggest a very autistic approach and understand the mechanics of comedy and practice - a but like when Sheldon Cooper was learning about sarcasm:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whats-so-funny-the-science-of-why-we-laugh/
I think this may be partly down to the poor connections many autists have with their emotions that causes this but also because of many of the social rules that we never really picked up when growing up.
Learning may help you understand and appreciate it better although we will still the be last one to laugh...
TheCatWoman said:Is it that you fail to understand a joke, or that the "joke" really wasn't funny and you're the only one honest enough to admit to it?
A very good question, that I'm struggling to answer. I do find with stand up comedians/comediennes there's a large part of me that seeks a forensic(for want of a better word)answer as to why x is or isn't funny. On the other hand I'll instinctively laugh at a wide range of things such as Fawlty towers, Marx brothers' movies(especially the earlier ones) and those police academy movies.
Is it that you fail to understand a joke, or that the "joke" really wasn't funny and you're the only one honest enough to admit to it? I'm the same with a lot of comedy, recently there seems to be a trend for humiliation either of others or more often the self, I find them excruciating to watch, fingers scratching down a blackboard painful. I get told I don't have much of a sense of humour, but I do, it's just more QI than Miranda. Plus as so much comedy is about identifying with it, they talk about things I don't understand or have little or no experience of.