One of the simple pleasures in life for a man of my age is telling a simple “dad joke” and getting a groan from your kids. Or a roll of the eyes from your wife! Unfortunately for the house jester, this doesn’t really work with children with autism. In almost every scenario a child with autism will take what we say literally, so any kind of joke or old saying is a usually either ignored or causes confusion.
We first noticed this with Victoria when she was a snotty toddler and we would give her a tissue and ask her to “blow her nose”. She had no idea what the tissue was for and all she needed to do was put her lips together and blow, upwards. We didn’t know she had autism at the time so this was a cute little thing we could share with friends and have a chuckle over.
It’s only now that we realise just how many colloquial terms we use in everyday speech.
“It’s raining cats and dogs” – “No it isn’t”
“It looks like a bomb has gone off in here” – not appropriate, especially now
“It’s like Blackpool illuminations in here” – “What’s… Blackpool illuminations?”
To be fair, that last one was from Emily but the point still stands.
I think we all adapt and change our language depending on who we are speaking to (I’m sure a lot of us are different in work vs home vs the pub for example) so this is just another of those adjustments we instinctively make day in day out. Or actually, we try to, but it’s pretty hard to undo 40+ years of language.
Victoria has recently started to tell jokes that she reads on the packs of her favourite yoghurts, but I’m not convinced that she gets the concept. She will read the joke and the punchline in one, in the same way you might read a newspaper headline, then laugh hysterically in a very false way which I believe is her way of fitting in and being “normal”. Waiting for the other person to say “I don’t know, why did the chicken cross the road?” is such an obvious thing for us to do, but something V would have to learn by copying others.
Football is another area full of funny phrases which can easily be misunderstood. The very first time I told Victoria to “get into space” she literally looked towards the sky! Space is up there after all so how on earth was she going to get there?! And all of this loops back to something I said in a previous post about education – it is hard enough for kids to learn new concepts as it is, but throw in the obvious language barrier for someone with autism and that task is twice as hard.
Anyway, I will end this post with a joke Victoria heard from her teacher last year and spent weeks repeating:
“I used to be a tap dancer… but I kept falling in the sink”
Why was he dancing on the sink and not in the dance hall where Victoria does tap?