Autistic License review: Using callous diagnoses to make subversive comedy
Ian Lynam's debut comedy is a jumping-off point into his singular, knockout style of humour. Photo: Steven Peice
Bewley's Café Theatre, Dublin Fringe Festival
★ ★ ★
Slunk low into a chair, listening to a doctor give a list of behavioural observations, Ian Lynam hears something life-changing. “He seems to have developed his own humour,” says the doctor, diagnosing Ian with autism.
In Lynam’s debut full-length comedy Autistic License, the remark is seen as a jumping-off point for his artistry. The comic revisits painful insults sustained on school-grounds and in workplaces, the manipulations conspired within bad relationships, and attempts to purge them with singular, knockout punchlines. All the while, an omnipresent therapist tries to derail him with damaging stereotypes.
There is an undeniable craft to these jokes, which often have artful diversions sewn into them. When Lynam describes how a consoling classroom task of writing a letter to George W. Bush after 9/11 turned into an out-of-control art project, depicting the attack on the World Trade Centre, his punchline focuses in on the matchstick figures wearing turbans representing al-Qaeda terrorists, making a mid-air escape. “A bit racist maybe,” he says, and after a pause: “… but parachutes”.
The routine seems interested in pursuing taboos, in saying something liberating in an otherwise un-permitted setting. During a presentation about the harmful legacies of influential diagnosticians (exposing Hans Asperger’s links to the Nazi party, for instance), there is a punchline about exterminating fascist criminals. A story about the inventor Hugo Hergensbeck, whose autism is often ignored, considers the innovation of his isolation-helmet, at a time when the only alternative sensory-controlled device for autistic people, Lynam jokes, was a coffin.
Those punchlines are delivered with such grim understatement, they feel like half-pulled grenades: uncertain jokes belonging to an angrier satire about ableist history. The rest of Autistic License is actually brighter, zingier as it triumphs over personal offences. In recalling being mocked for his Asperger’s diagnosis as a child, he jokes: “You have to remember this was the ‘90s, back before eating ass was cool”. One sassy takedown of a devious ex-girlfriend goes like this: “You better switch to ESB because your gaslighting doesn’t work anymore”.
As a sudden episode about studying critical theory at college leads to a witty overhaul of popular culture and representations of autistic people, the overall routine struggles to balance its blend of personal biography and social history; this section is a rich conceit for a whole other routine in itself. It’s interesting that there is a joke later on about aspiring to the achievement of Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette as Lynam can be similarly disinterested in triggering relief, as if the old conventions of comedy no longer work. When discussing Benedict Cumberbatch’s approach on portraying autistic pioneer Alan Turing in The Imitation Game, there’s barely any cathartic punchline. Just undiluted rage.
That’s all part of a routine where the boundaries get constantly redrawn just as you think you’ve found their markings. Lynam out-performs Autistic License in a sense; his creativity is greater than the parameters of the show. It’s a whirling exciting debut, especially as a number of ecstatic call-backs towards the conclusion see the comic vanquish his demons, bringing the routine to a satisfying close.
Run ends 25th September.