Somewhere along the line I missed the joke. On the show The Middle, the youngest kid, Brick, often mutters under his breath a repeat of a word he just said. What’s the joke?
It’s a compulsion and when he lies the truth still get’s exposed. It’s not funny, it’s just a quirk for his character that causes funny situations.
Luckily, they’ve cut it down to once per episode, but I keep hoping they’ll just kill it completely. It’s really an awful gag, has never been funny, and never will be funny.
That’s always been broadly hinted at. For now, I think, he’s just “special.”
Albert Einstein did that as a kid too.
my friend was at a bar talking to a girl and noticed that she would randomly turn away sometimes mid-conversation. as the night drew on, and both parties got progressively drunker, he got enough liquid courage to ask her why she would turn away periodically. she responded “this is embarrassing to admit but… i have a speech impediment… impediment.”
this was before “The Middle” came on TV. nothing really came from the encounter - no digits exchanged, but we wonder to this day if she was for real, or if she was just messing with us.
My son has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, and he used to do this when he was younger.
I’ve never been diagnosed, but used to do the same thing when I was a child. I eventually stopped the practice, but it transitioned into this experience in which my last word or phrase would “echo” in my head, especially if it was the end of a conversation. This still happens to me occasionally.
My own theory: I think that people with Asperger’s and related Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) get into the habit of constantly self-checking to make sure that what they are doing in social situations is “correct.” Repeating a word or phrase is a way of double-checking what they have just said (to verify that it sounds correct), but has the unfortunate side-effect of the practice itself not being “normal” behavior.
I think that this double-checking extends to other forms of communication, like my practice of carefully previewing emails and even posts like this to make sure there aren’t any mistakes. I also think it’s related to other compulsive behaviors, like double- and even triple-checking that the door is locked when leaving the house.
I also did this when I was a child. I didn’t really say anything under my breath but people noticed that I would say something and then mouth it over again. It was noticable enough that I had to consciously break the habit.
This is exactly what I was doing. I still find that I can’t dial a phone number without re-checking it half way through.
I’ve never been diagnosed with Asperger’s but no one my age would have been.
It almost never reveals a lie. Brick just repeats one of the last words he just said, usually the very last word.
@Ellis Dee,
Does that help? The latter half of the sentence is a separate quirk. (Edited to add the comma that emphasizes what I think is a compound sentence).
Not really, because I don’t recall him ever revealing a lie through a whisper. The whisper never provides additional information; it’s always repeating a word he just said normally.
It did knock him out of a spelling bee when he whisper-repeated the last letter, making his spelling technically incorrect. That’s something different, though.
I could have forgotten an example and am happy to be corrected, though.
I feel like they included it because the show is so extremely similar to Malcolm in the Middle, and they wanted to separate Brick from Dewey. Malcolm did the whole premise consistently better, but they really didn’t need to do this.
Meh, Malcom in the Middle was a boys’ club. I like just about any sitcom but I couldn’t get into that one. I dig the feminine energy of The Middle.
The similarity of the two names is pretty unfortunate.
The title of The Middle is the main thing wrong with it. It’s a great show, but a horrible title.
@Ellis Dee:
As I’m not all that familiar with the show, I had to turn to TVTropes for clarification. Check out the section entitled “You can always tell a liar” here:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheMiddle
In an interview Atticus Shaffer who plays Brick stated “the character Brick was based on one of the creator’s sons. He actually whispered from time to time, and therefore it went into the character … Eileen Heisler’s son.” He did not go on to say IF Eileens son had autism or aspergers.
He’ll whisper “I’m lying” when he’s, well, lying.
It’s his “tell”.
It’s called palilalia…certainly kids on the Aspergers spectrum do it, but it’s not exclusive to them as far as I know.