Eccentric, blunt-speaking characters who present as being on the spectrum are everywhere on our screens – but why are their creators so reluctant to state it openly?
I received my autism diagnosis about a decade into my career as a comedian and about three decades into being alive. In the eyes of some of the frothier comment section trolls, being a comedian means that I can’t be autistic, despite the likes of Fern Brady and Stewart Lee proving otherwise. This is because people are keener on stereotypes than admitting they know nothing about autism – why is the general level of knowledge so poor?
With Elon Musk and Robert F Kennedy Jr doing their best to make autism terrifying again, either by implying that it causes sieg heiling or by bringing back the MMR autism panic of the 1990s (along with actual measles), it struck me that we autistic people don’t have a lot of reliable representation to fall back on. There’s Rain Man, of course, and Ben Affleck in The Accountant, where he plays a sort of autistic accountant assassin and … that’s it. Neither depiction is hugely informative or accurate, though I suppose the assassin stuff could ward off some of the more gullible bullies.
Continue reading...
