Cool Aspie Humor: Cognitive Difference and Kenneth Burke’s Comic Corrective in The Big Bang Theory and Community

The article explores the complexities of humor in the context of intellectual disability, autism, and Asperger’s Syndrome. Specifically, the rhetorician Kenneth Burke’s theory of perspective by incongruity is applied to humor theory, and there is a focus on his comic corrective as a way of understanding potentially transformative contexts of humor and disability. Two television shows, The Big Bang Theory and Community, are considered, the argument being that each offers new and unexpected ways of understanding and blurring categories such as “autistic” and “neurotypical,” as well as “nondisabled” and “disabled.”