CAN a heckle change your life? It’s a question the comedian Pierre Novellie has been asking himself for the last couple of years.
In 2022, during a preview for his Edinburgh Fringe show ‘Pierre Novellie: Why Can’t I Just Enjoy Things?’ An audience member’s comment transformed Novellie’s image of himself.
“It was quite a nice hipstery gig,” Novellie recalls as he sits in his London flat on a grey, flat, “swampy” day in late June.
“It was a chatty crowd, but in a good way. And this guy in the front row piped up in response to some of my ‘why can’t I just enjoy things?’ questions.
“He said, ‘Well, you just sound like me.’ I said, ‘What do you mean by that?’ He said, ‘I have Asperger’s and I think you have Asperger’s.’
“It was a heckle, but it was said with complete neutrality. He wasn’t yelling.”
It prompted Novellie, a Fringe veteran who’s been a regular at Edinburgh for the last decade and until recently Frank Skinner’s sidekick on the latter’s Saturday morning Absolute Radio show (the programme was dropped by the station in May), to seek a diagnosis. And, yes, it turned out, he is autistic.
“The irony is,” Novellie adds, “that years before, when Fern Brady got her autism diagnosis, I messaged her and said, ‘Oh, congratulations’. And she said, ‘I think you are as well.’
“I said, ‘No, no, no, I don’t think so.’
“I had already looked into it and I ruled it out.”
That’s one of the reasons Novellie has now written a book, ‘Why Can’t I Just Enjoy Things: A Comedian’s Guide to Autism’. Because, he feels, so much of the information that is available on the subject can be confusing or misleading. He’s hoping the book can help others who find themselves in a similar situation. And hopefully make them laugh.
So, two years later, having now written a book on the subject, can he answer that question at the top of the page? What has changed since he was given the diagnosis?
“In actual fact, nothing will change about you. Unlike ADHD, autism has no medication. You are just like this.
“But what will change is you will have an explanation.
“And people may not like the explanation, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is you have it. Certainly it’s made myself a lot easier to explain to others.”
Has it changed his sense of self?
Yes, he says. The diagnosis means you gain some certainty. That said, you might lose a little hope too.
“Especially if you are heavily adapted or masking, like myself, and have always been rewarded for that.
“You lose your hope that the things you have to pretend to be able to do you will be able to do naturally. ‘Eventually, I’ll want to go on holiday more often. Eventually, I’ll want to leave the house as much as people seem to want to leave the house.’ Whatever it is.
“And the truth is you won’t. It’s not going to happen.
“So, you lose that hope.
“But you gain certainty. You can plan your life using the certainty. So it’s a trade-off. It makes you feel a bit more limited, but it unlocks other things.”
Novellie’s explanation of his situation has much of the same qualities he brings to his stand-up; wry, amused, with a clear and literate through line. It’s something that will be on display again this August in his new Fringe show, Must We?
It’s interesting he mentions his fellow comedian Fern Brady, I say. She is one of a number of neurodivergent comedians who have been open about their conditions in recent years. Johnny Vegas and Sue Perkins have both announced that they have been diagnosed with ADHD.
Perhaps neurodivergent brains lend themselves to comedy? Novellie thinks there might be something in that, though he spreads the net wider.
“It’s a lot easier to write comedy if you are an outsider. If you look at the history of American comedy writers there’s a reason they are almost always Catholic or Jewish or African-American. They are almost always slightly on the outside. There are very, very few big successful white Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, Waspy American comedians.”
But when it comes to autism, he suggests, there is a level of analysis that comes with ASD that lends itself to humour.
“Autism and ADHD mimic schizophrenic thinking to a degree, in the way they make these very sideways leaps to do with logic.
“There’s something to do with imagination and unusual neurostructure that we haven’t figured out, but those sideways sudden leaps of logic you get from some comedians, that mad pulling together of threads; people with ADHD are very good at that kind of thing because they are constantly pulling random threads together anyway. So why not make them funny?”
And maybe comedy attracts neurodivergent people, he suggests, because you can be your own boss.
“Comedy is full of absolutely unemployable people. If there was no comedy I don’t know where you could possibly put us, because it’s not a group of people who react well to being ordered around.”
Pierre Novellie: Must We? 19:05 Monkey Barrel Comedy, July 29 – August 25
Why Can’t I Just Enjoy Things? A Comedian’s Guide to Autism, will be published by Blink in July.