From Fern Brady to Hannah Gadsby, a host of comedians have discovered that they are autistic. What is it about standup that lends itself so well to neurodivergent people?
In 2020, Pierre Novellie was previewing an early version of his standup show Why Can’t I Just Enjoy Things? – things such as holidays and trips to the cinema (due to the “all the chewing and rustling packets”) – when he was interrupted by an audience member’s polite heckle. “He said: ‘You sound like me,’” recalls Novellie. The comedian asked what that meant. “He said: ‘I have Asperger’s – I think you have Asperger’s.’”
The next day, Novellie began seriously looking into the prospect that he was autistic (the term Asperger’s is no longer commonly used, partly because of its namesake’s Nazi affiliations, but some autistic people still refer to it). He began taking multiple online tests, alternating between answering completely truthfully and “in the most normal, sociable way” he could, yet both approaches put him firmly above the threshold for autism. In 2022, he finally received a formal diagnosis – by which point he’d realised that the title of Why Can’t I Just Enjoy Things? wasn’t rhetorical. “It turned out there was an answer: these were inherently autistic routines,” says Novellie (in the case of rustling packets, sound sensitivity is common in autistic people). “So that became the ending of the show.”
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