Book Review: Funny, You Don’t Look Autistic

Funny, You Don’t Look Autistic: A Comedian’s Guide to Life on the Spectrum, by Michael McCreary, is a “growing up with autism” story from a somewhat unusual source: a standup comedian. Autistic people aren’t typically known for our senses of humor or ease with handling a crowd. The stereotype is more intelligence with math and science. Naturally, Mr. McCreary is absolutely awful with math.

If You’ve Met One Person with Autism…

The fact is, autistic people don’t fit neatly into a shoebox. We’re all kinds of people, including actors, accountants, and athletes. Our hobbies (“special interests”) vary from trains to animals to foraging. We have commonalities, but like any group of people, there’s a lot of diversity, too. Since autism is a neurological condition, that includes racial and gender diversity as well as basic neurological differences.

One of the challenges of being an autism advocate is trying to speak for such a broad range of people. Some of us speak many languages fluently. Others don’t speak at all. Mr. McCreary pointedly says at the beginning of Funny, You Don’t Look Autistic, that he’s pretty much only speaking for himself. I did find it a nice touch that he grew up with an autistic brother, and one rather different than him. It made for an interesting comparison point as the story went on.

Like a lot of autism memoir-style books, this one mainly covers the author’s childhood. It’s a strange feature of books by autistic people that we do tend to write memoirs before becoming old and grey. I choose to believe it’s because we’re just too interesting to wait until our stories are nearly finished. The world needs to know us, and about us, now. It can’t wait for another two or three decades.

I don’t have a good sense for how to be funny, because that’s not one of my focuses in life. But I do have enough pattern recognition to recognize that this book is written in a cross between the typical plainspoken autistic “I’m explaining myself” tone and the typical stand-up comedian storytelling/joke style. That may make this book easier to digest. And, y’know, funnier. A lot of humor is context-sensitive. The author does a pretty good job of giving you the needed context, thankfully.

Not Alone

One of the major differences I see between Mr. McCreary’s life and mine is that he found his tribe, so to speak. In less obscure terms, he found and befriended other autistic people. People that accepted him for who he was, eccentricities and all. He talks about this friend group and how it was much more supportive for him overall than even shared hobby groups based around theater.

He’s less than 10 years younger than me, but I guess that must’ve made a major difference in recognizing and diagnosing people. I didn’t get my diagnosis until my early 20s. It took me until middle school to find other (probably, none of us knew) autistic people, and until high school for people overall to tolerate me and to really find a place I felt comfortable in. So naturally, my family had to move away pretty much immediately.

Probably mine would be a happier story if it had included this kind of support. Or even a clue that I wasn’t so incredibly abnormal that no one at all was like me. Instead, I spent much of my childhood isolated because no one understood me and I had no clue how to do anything but survive each day.

So I’m jealous of what the author had, but also glad… because it’s what I want for every autistic person. It’s why social groups just for autistic people are so important. In meeting our tribe and accepting them, we learn to accept ourselves. And y’know, knowing people who have similar issues to yours means more ideas for how to cope with them.

A last note: at no point in the story is the title relevant. I’m uncertain as to whether it’s a reference to a bit the author does in his standup comedy, or just something he or the publisher thought was clever. Either way, I’m not really sure what “autistic” is supposed to look like.

Read This Book If

You’d like to read an extra funny “my life with autism” story where the author . The chapters are short and easily digestible. The humor is clean and family-friendly. Overall, Funny, You Don’t Look Autistic is a good story, told well.