Breaking of the patterns: This is precisely what I have seen (witnessed) made Charlie laugh. Humor in Aristophanes’ comedies is often about the fantastic (Birds, even Clouds) and the typical/normal worked through to its logical craziness (again the Clouds, perhaps).

Witness in Latin is testes and I am still laughing about Matt TEACCH-er.

As for autism comedy: start with the simple forms of comic sense that seem to be shared among almost all the autistic people I know, and that flow directly from the set of larger shared autistic aesthetic sensibilities that I see in so many of us: affinity for patterns, repetition, and minor-variation-within-repetition. The comic sense that flows from this is a burlesque of these aesthetic sensibilities: breakage of patterns, interference between patterns, nonsensical juxtaposition of patterns, extension of patterns beyond sensible context.

Puns and wordplay are the examples of this comic sense that may be most accessible to the mainstream population.

Upon being introduced to Matt Lerner, director of the Boston-area drama-therapy program Spotlight, my son Jeremy said “wouldn’t it be funny if his name were ‘Matt Teacher’?”…

Breaching boundaries of literalness, or of theory-of-mind context, can be sources of mirth as well:

1. Once, when Jim Sinclair (who is intersexed, as well as autistic) said something particularly noteworthy and powerful, someone told him “you da Man” — to which he replied, without missing a beat: “No — I be da Neuter”.

2. My all-time favorite Mel Brooks sight gag probably goes relatively unnoticed by most people. It comes in “High Anxiety”, his great send-up of Alfred Hitchcock filmography. It isn’t even connected with any of the Hitchcock films he parodies though. It’s a short sequence in which the protagonists are driving down the LA freeway and one of them says a line with the words “high” and “anxiety” in it, and dramatic music wells up. But this dramatic music is not just audible to the audience: the protagonists hear it too. They look at each other, and then out the car window to the adjacent lane, where a big honking tour-bus with the logo LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC on its sides is passing them by, full of musicians inside playing /fortissimo/ the music we — and the protagonists — have been hearing…

Comic play-with-patterns can be non-verbal as well — visual, musical, spatial.

A true autistic comedy should be constructed from views of the world around us through lenses such as these. At least IMHO .

I wish I could have been there as well–too much going on here and I’m still on overload from P.’s bar mitzvah and his performance in his school play. We’ve come a long way–from the days of agonizing tantrums and crippling anxiety to this sudden young man reciting Shakespeare in costume on a lighted stage. I love your remarks. Advocacy. Witness. Hope.

Yes.