Sandra Thom-Jones said autistic comedy depends on who is in on the joke

A speaker at the Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Sydney in June 2024 brought an old film to the media panel. They had recently rewatched Police Academy, a comedy from the 1980s that they had first seen when very young and had found incredibly funny. Watching it again with a better understanding of neurological difference, they said, they realised that quite a lot of its characters were neurologically different. It made them think that many neurodivergent characteristics, particularly in the 1980s, had been linked to comedy. They asked the panel whether that had been a positive or a negative representation.

Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the media panel, said everyone knew the film, though he did not remember it well, and passed the question to Sandra Thom-Jones. She began by connecting it to what she said she had been talking about earlier in the session, the whole question of whether a character is canon or coded, stated to be autistic or given the traits without the label. It was really tricky ground, she said, and people needed to ask “are we laughing with the person or are we laughing at the person”.