After reading your description of his behavior, my thoughts went to mild Asperger’s syndrome as well. Someone his age may have well gone undiagnosed, and managed to get through life being the “odd” kid.
Constantly reading self-help literature, and taking on well-defined easily imitated “personas” would be understandable coping methods for such a person, who really doesn’t have many intuitive resources for interacting with people. Not being able to correctly read the facial expressions or body language of others is a common symptom.
That said, my 18-year old stepson, who has Asperger’s, has a fairly well-developed sense of humor. He seems to get a wide range of jokes, (as long as they aren’t directed at him personally–even the most lighthearted teasing upsets him) and he makes up a lot of jokes and riddles of his own, a decent percentage of which are quite funny.
davenportranger I’m not going to accuse you of gross generalization, but I will say that your experience with seniors is obviously limited to a bunch of yokels. Irony and sarcasm aren’t new to this age. Think Dorothy Parker and Oscar Levant (hell, think of Oscar Wilde). Think of any older comedy with sophistacated repartee All About Eve, *The Philadephia Story * or The Thin Man
Reminds me of a friend, walking home from church with his 3 young daughters. The middle one, about 4 at the time, was swinging around the signs along the sidewalk. One of his friends from church says something about her maybe running into the street and getting hit. He says without missing a beat, “Why do you think we had three?”
Now that’s funny, that you say “uncle”. He insists on all the kids calling him “Uncle ----”. But you’re right: he is a good and kind man, and he means well. I don’t mean to sound so overly critical; I’m just trying to illustrate where my frustration is coming from. A lot of his “goofiness” (for lack of a better word) comes across as trying way too hard to be chummy - it often goes so far over the top that it has the opposite of the desired effect: it repels people who don’t understand where he’s coming from. To be perfectly honest, I would like to get out of here myself. But I don’t have the heart to just bail, because he can’t afford this house by himself.
He’s a divorced guy. He and his ex-wife raised two adopted daughters together. But his wife split not long after the youngest daughter was grown and moved out. I kind of suspect (though I don’t know for sure, since we haven’t discussed it) that the situation was similar to why my dad left my mom. My mom is good Christian woman, like my roommate is good Christian man. Nothing wrong with that. But when your whole life starts to revolve around doing “church stuff” (Sunday morning, Wednesday night, Thursday men’s/women’s group, jumping at every opportunity to teach a class) and a nonstop barrage of TV preachers and gospel music at home … the spouse can start to feel neglected. As my dad described it to me shortly after my parents split up, he told my mom, “You get up at 5:00 AM every day to read your Bible, and every night you’re ‘too tired’ to make love.” (TMI from my perspective, but there you go).
When his marriage ended, my roommate quit the marriage counselor business, feeling that he had lost his credibility. Not an unreasonable feeling, I guess. Now he scrapes by on SSI Disability checks. Which brings me to …
He suffers from some bizarre condition of his nervous system. 50 years worth of doctors have never been able to figure out what’s wrong with him. You can’t use a cell phone or a microwave oven if he’s in the room - he says he can “feel” the radiation. Certain smells give him problems, though this seems to be a strangely selective reaction - I smoke, and I mistakenly thought he was aware of this before I moved in (I’d known him for several years before moving in). He never noticed the smell (or didn’t mention it) until I happened to mention that I was going outside for a cigarette a couple weeks after I moved in. Suddenly, he could smell the faintest trace of cigarette smoke on me instantly, while standing in the kitchen at the back of the house, as I was coming in the front door. And yet he can’t smell the orange-scented Pine-Sol I use to mop the floors, despite the fact that the smell permeates the entire house for several hours after I’ve mopped.
I think his current doctor has a financial interest in the local health food store. He calls my roommate every couple of weeks, suggesting some new dietary supplement that might help him. As a result, my roommate has literally hundreds of bottles of vitamins, minerals, herbs, enzymes, nostrums, potions and snake oils, each with a $29.95 price sticker.
Autism or Asperger’s? I suppose it’s possible that a trained psychologist like he is could go this long and remain undiagnosed himself, but I find it unlikely, especially considering how much time he has spent with doctors over the years.
You may be on to something here. He does take things very literally, often without considering the context in which they’re spoken. This caused a bit of a problem a couple weeks ago. He was considering buying a house (which I don’t understand - how does he expect to buy a house when he can’t pay the rent on this one by himself?) Anyway, he was describing the house he’d looked at, and telling me that it wasn’t a very nice place. Then he added (we were in the kitchen), “And it doesn’t have a dishwasher.” (Yes, he was making a little joke!) So I responded with, “Oh no! You’d have to do manual labor!”
My reply was meant as a joke, spoken purely in the context of doing the dishes, something we have discussed before. He hates doing the dishes (that’s what a wife’s for, you know), and so he leaves his dirty dishes in the sink and piled on the counters until he runs out of clean stuff. Then he loads it all into the dishwasher. (For the record, I use very few dishes myself, and when I do I generally hand-wash them in the sink and put them away as soon as I’m done with them.) Meanwhile, he is very put out if I inadvertently leave bits of food in the little basket on the sink plug, and always calls it to my attention - despite his dirty dishes being piled everywhere.
So I made my little joke about manual labor, meaning nothing more than, “Oh no, you’d have to wash the dishes by hand!” Five minutes later, he came knocking on my bedroom door.
“Rik, did you say that to hurt me?”
“Um, no …”
“Do you know why that hurt me?”
“Um, I guess so …” (realizing how he had interpreted it - he thought I was making fun of his disability!)
Frankly, it hurt my feelings that he would think I would deliberately say something to be hurtful. Honestly, this was my first solid realization that my roommate is not very good at putting words together with their context. I mentioned that I lived in a homeless shelter for a while. There were lots of men there with various disabilities. These were my friends, I and wouldn’t even think of deliberately poking fun at their disabilities, or anybody else’s disabilities.
Wouldn’t this inability to take things in context be a severe liability for a psychologist?
Nah. When I was growing up, I was convinced that my mom had no sense of humor. I’d tell her a joke or show her a cartoon and she’d go, “Mm-hmm.” I figured out when I was older that she got the jokes and thought they were funny - she just wasn’t an uproarious laugher. She loves dry British humor.
My roommate, OTOH, just stares at the cartoons with a baffled look on his face.
Ah hah! Personas, eh? Did I mention that one of the fun things he does is go to schools where he dresses up as Abraham Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt, and pretends to be the President for the kids?
I initially assumed that I didn’t “get” the cartoon. Now that I’ve seen the explanation, it appears that I understood the point, but didn’t find anything particularly funny about it.
My dad used to have a chum who was constantly telling horrible, stupid jokes. Once he told one of these stinkers, and when my father failed to laugh, the friend said “Whatsa matter? Don’tcha get it?”
My dad said “Oh, I get it, all right. I just don’t want it.”
By the way, I should mention that I understood the joke, and recognized that there was some humor there, but it didn’t tickle my particular funnybone.
And, I am alone here in finding something perversely humorous in the fact that we are discussing a guy who doesn’t understand why certain things are funny, using a cartoon featuring a guy who clearly doesn’t understand why certain things **aren’t ** funny?
I used to work in the records management area of a big federal office. I’d been there about 6 months.
A long-term employee of our department asked me what she was supposed to do with a bunch of old records that were in boxes in a storage room. I said “gee Jean, I dunno … shred 'em?” … and laughed. Another employee laughed too.
The other employee and I realized how funny it was that Jean, the one who had been there the longest, was asking ME what to do.
About half an hour later I realized that I’d heard some machinery grinding away down the hall. You guessed it - she was SHREDDING the damn files!!!
I had to explain that one to my supervisor - luckily she was more upset with Jean than she was with me. I still feel bad though - the supervisor really reamed her out.
Just another example of how people who are overly literal-minded just don’t “get” jokes / goofing around.
Now this is the funniest thing in the whole thread (so far).
Phase42, the more you say about your roommate, the more I’m led to believe he’s got some form of Aspergers, or the nervous disorder he has demonstrates similar symptoms. IANA doctor, psychologist, neurologist or have any relevant training whatsoever, but I do listen to NPR a lot.
From my limited understanding, common symptoms of autism/aspergers (honestly I don’t really know the difference) are related to inability to read the nuances of other people’s faces, gestures or intentions. This is related to how those with autism process sensory details. One example I remember from an NPR interview is that, for most people, if you say the word “steeple,” most will think of a generic building with the structural qualities of a steeple (pointy roof and so on). You say “steeple” to someone with autism, and they will think of a specific steeple in a specific place that they have seen with their own eyes (or in a photograph). In other words, while most people think in generalities, those with autism think in specifics. This is why those with autism can have exceptional skill with details, such as music, mathematics, and computer science. It is also why they can be overwhelmed with details and have a hard time focusing on too many forms of stimulus at once, sometimes avoid touching and being touched for this reason, or from looking directly into the eyes or face of another person.
As for the church involvement, I could see this fitting the pattern too, of being something your roommate can get very involved with on a detailed level, and provides a relatively unambiguous social construct which is probably easier to navigate than every day life.
Of course this is a huge generality and there are LOTS of variations of autism which manifest themselves in many different ways in different people. I’ve heard about adults with autism who did not know they had it for years and years, for the very reason that they lead normal, perfectly functional, fulfilling lives. But one very common thread is a greater-than-average struggle with social situations and ability to relate to people.
I don’t know about this. During my brief experience with a counselor, she rarely responded to humor. Everything I said was taken seriously and discussed as legitimate, even if I specifically said I was joking. In a way, it seems it could be beneficial to someone in that profession. Your patients can’t trick you by joking around their problems.
But you’re right: he is a good and kind man, and he means well. I don’t mean to sound so overly critical; I’m just trying to illustrate where my frustration is coming from. A lot of his “goofiness” (for lack of a better word) comes across as trying way too hard to be chummy - it often goes so far over the top that it has the opposite of the desired effect: it repels people who don’t understand where he’s coming from. To be perfectly honest, I would like to get out of here myself. But I don’t have the heart to just bail, because he can’t afford this house by himself.
