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.
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.
Roy said:I think I tend to overthink the joke
I tend to do that.