Is neurodivergence actually the norm in stand-up?

Pierre Novellie: Must We? | Pic: Matt Stronge

“We may have already passed the peak of neurodivergence seeming unusual at the Fringe,” Pierre Novellie ventures. “Maybe it's taken as a given, because it's starting to seem like the norm within this weird little group. There's going to come a point where we acknowledge that the majority of comedians are neurodivergent in some way.”

Typically, the internet's algorithms are ahead of us, with the Edinburgh Fringe's booking site featuring a “neurodiversity-led” filter, enabling prospective audiences to explore where thinking differently is taking place at the festival. If ADD, dyslexia, dyspraxia or dysmorphia are your interest, then there are performers out there talking about it.

Novellie was diagnosed as autistic in 2022, having been prompted by a heckler in Bristol who told him: “I have Asperger’s. And I think you have Asperger’s.”  In his recently published book, Why Can't I Just Enjoy Things?, the comic explains with dry, but exhaustively researched wit, why “Asperger’s” — a problematic, outdated term for several reasons, chiefly Nazi — is no longer used.

Yet while it's unhelpful to generalise too widely about a broad spectrum of experience — and it has become a truism to say that “if you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person” — speaking to me now, he breaks down why an autistic observational comedian isn't the oxymoron it initially seems.

Theoretically, an observational comic is accomplished at noticing patterns of human behaviour, something autistic people generally find more difficult. But Novellie cites the paragon of observational stand-up, Jerry “what's the deal with...?” Seinfeld, who has previously identified with having Asperger’s.

“If there was one celebrity I could send my book to, it would be him,” he suggests. “He clearly doesn't feel comfortable saying he's neurodiverse. But he's definitely in the gang. He's described having an 'extra sensitivity'. And I think that's where observations come from. If you look at his comedy, and quite a lot of mine, it's a sensitivity to weird social or daily things that people do without thinking. The observational comedy that people really love is where the comedian points something out humorously and everyone goes 'oh yeah!' with a slap to their forehead.”

Such a blessing can also be a curse though. As Novellie relates in his latest show, Must We?, “a big part of what makes autism tiring is that there are very few things you can do without consciously thinking the whole time. If you're going to be ironing all day, you want to be able to zone out. But you can't, everything has to be done longhand effectively and examined from different angles.”

Meanwhile, and especially for the late-diagnosed and so-called “high-functioning” like him, autistic people have spent their entire lives adapting to a neurotypical world.   

“You've been forced to have empathy with everyone who's not autistic, which doesn't happen the other way around” he argues. “But it does mean that you can inhabit two perspectives at once, which tends to make your observations stand out more.”

Furthermore, the clash between those perspectives, the difficulties when the neurodiverse and neurotypical don't see eye-to-eye, particularly if one struggles to make eye contact, inform a lot of comedians' anecdotes of social embarrassment and awkwardness. Novellie's girlfriend is constantly challenged by his complicated relationship with food and online shopping cluttering up every part of their home. In the show Pete and Me, Graham Kay charts his relationship with his profoundly autistic brother from childhood to today, while Josephine Lacey's Autism Mama is about raising an autistic son and the difficulties inherent in nurturing his awakening sexuality. 

Gay, Glaswegian, working-class, Catholic, Celtic-supporting stand-ups Larry Dean and Susie McCabe are both wary of a journalist conflating their experience as late-diagnosed autistics, heaping another label onto the way they're described. Not least because in her show, Merchant Of Menace, McCabe rails against being described as “unashamedly” this and “unashamedly” that, when she's never accepted socially prescribed prejudices of feeling less because of who she is. 

Susie McCabe: Merchant of Menace | Pic: Andrew Jackson/Curse These Eyes

So I bribed them both with brunch.

Both had been pushed to seek a diagnosis by their partners. “It's been such a thing for other people” Dean discloses. “They've been validated by it, more so than me constantly noticing that something I do is an autistic thing. I only wanted it because every partner I've been out with has said I should get a test, since my first boyfriend back in 2012. So it's been good and bad, in that it's good I got diagnosed, because I've got a little bit of material about it. But it's also bad because all my exes were right all along. And I've got a little bit of material about that too.”

Larry Dean: Dodger | Pic: Matt Crockett

McCabe, who has the additional perspective of having undergone an emergency heart procedure on the eve of the Fringe, feels the same, maintaining: “I'm 44 and I've lived a life. If me knowing it can make life easier for the people around me, because they understand, that's great. But it doesn't suffocate me and disable me the way it does other people.”

However, while it's certainly important to note the variation in levels of autism and additional support that some individuals may require – and probably resist blanket terming the condition a boon or “superpower” for stand-up – what McCabe says carries an implicit caveat for comedy, that knowing about her neurodiversity changes her act, perhaps banishing such domestic scenarios as the tale of her wife despairing at the designated little vacuum cleaner she uses for her Lego.

“That's true” she admits. “I bought a wee hoover for my Lego to clean it. And my wife's like, 'A hoover for your Lego and all those spreadsheets? Get you to the doctors!”

McCabe also reflects that if there's one consistency across most autistic people, it's their struggle to express and interpret emotions. It is telling that she, Dean, and latterly, Novellie, are all facially expressive acts. It's been something that they've really had to work at, either consciously or unconsciously, from “masking” as neurotypical.

“I used to be concentrating so much on the audience, trying to read the room, that if I wasn't careful, I'd lapse into a sort of neutral expression,” Novellie recalls. “It's annoying but you can get another 50% of juice out of a joke just from pulling the right face. I've been playing around with a lot more different expressions, trying them on. Certainly, since lockdown, I've been putting on a mock-severe face that for certain routines, in a silly way, I'm using to tell audiences off.”

And that lack of understanding, sensitivity and tact, feigned or otherwise, is in part why Novellie believes that not only is autism over-represented or endemic in stand-up, but might even be it's “origin point”.  The act of standing on stage with a microphone and controlling a room is already an attempt to shape and regulate social parameters in one's favour. But if we accept that, like the blues, stand-up is a quintessentially American artform, then, without making claims for their brain functions, some of its most celebrated practitioners, like Lenny Bruce, George Carlin and Bill Hicks, embody the persona of the “antisocial truth-teller”, blithely dispensing hard realities.

Even the milquetoast Seinfeld does it, Novellie suggests. “For an experiment, just pick any of his really antisocial routines and read them out loud to yourself in an angry voice and see how much less genial they sound when he's not smiling.

“'I don't like going out! I just don't like going out! Leave me alone!’

“He's actually quite grouchy. And it serves really well.”

Pierre Novellie: Must We? Monkey Barrel Comedy, 7.05pm, until 25 August; Susie McCabe: Merchant of Menace, Assembly George Square Studios, various times, 2-11 & 13-25 August; Larry Dean: Dodger, Monkey Barrel Comedy, 8.30pm, 2-12 & 14-25 August