Movers, Dreamers, and Risk-Takers by Kevin Roberts

Author:Kevin Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hazelden Publishing

DELIGHT IN DISPARITY

An ADHDer in the classroom, or in a meeting at work, often takes more delight from shattering people’s realities than from participating in them. Most people take this sort of behavior as an insult. It is merely a function, however, of how our creative and exploratory minds work. When an ADHDer receives new information or is in a new situation, the mind naturally and automatically brings a freshness that underlies the ability to glean new insights and perspectives.

Another joke will illustrate a feature of our humorous abilities in which we take particular delight: defeating expectations. (By contrast, we often feel defeated by our frequent inability to live up to the expectations that others thrust upon us!) If I say, “I took my father out for Thanksgiving,”12 you will probably have an automatic—perhaps completely unconscious—expectation of what that means. Obviously, I took my father out for a meal. The line is structured to lead you to that conclusion. Thanksgiving is, after all, associated with eating. Playing on that reality, an adept comedian will deliver a punch line that destroys the picture that you have created for yourself. Your own biases and beliefs determine the way that you perceive the information.

One of the jobs of the comedian is to flip that perception. To shatter the picture of taking my father out for dinner, I could follow up by saying, “That old bastard deserved it.” Or I could deliver the message with “That was the best ten thousand bucks I ever spent.” Your old picture is gone now, and in its place is a new reality that reveals an unexpected meaning of the original statement. You now know that I had my father killed. I’ve always wanted to be on America’s Most Wanted, so here’s my chance.

The bottom line here is that we ADHDers are good at making people laugh because our natural style of thinking lends itself to making unexpected associations between seemingly unrelated pieces of data. This simple—yet hard-to-master—method underpins the fundamental structure of comedy.

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