Asperger's Are Us

Written by: Si Hawkins
Published: Thursday 22nd June 2017

This may come as a shock, but not everyone has Netflix. The mighty streaming service does seem to dominate the world's viewing these days, but there's also a big heap of people without it. Amazon Prime viewers, for example. So it's plausible that a lot of readers have never come across Asperger's Are Us, the Netflix documentary about the US sketch quartet with that name, and condition.

As the interview below suggests, the chaps have a few reservations about how that doc turned out, but it probably helped raise their profile enough that they're now on a European tour, that's about to hit Britain. So, what can we expect from Asperger's Are Us?

"Perpetual disappointment!" laughs today's AAU spokesperson, Noah Britton. "Our shows are always the type of humour at which Aspies excel: deadpan absurdist sketches with a bit of wordplay and satire thrown in. We've heard the UK is quite good at anti-jokes so we're trying to step up our game as much as possible."

They're bringing their A-game. But how did Britton and the gang get here?

First gig?

August, 2010, at the events room at a fish restaurant in Salem, Massachusetts. About 40 of our friends showed up and seemed to enjoy it quite a bit.

They didn't have a backstage so we set up a curtain in a corner, and they also didn't have a stage so to indicate that the stage lights were off or on we borrowed a lamp with a footswitch and stepped on it as every sketch began or ended. It was not very effective and we returned this lamp in somewhat worse condition than how we received it.

The other thing I remember about this show was that we had a sketch where someone had to eat a banana and when the banana was backstage someone put it on the ground which of course meant that it got stepped on and there was banana oozing out on our other props. One joke we did that night that we don't bother to do anymore is handing out raffle tickets to everyone as they arrived but not awarding anyone any prizes.

Another joke was that we had a guy who was never onstage at any other time come out for the bow as if he were an extra member of the troupe. He was later upset that we didn't actually include him in any of the sketches.

We often privately reference a sketch from that show, where we kept listing non-sequiturs and saying they reminded us of Afroman songs. Afroman isn't well-known enough for us to do that sketch in our normal set though.

Favourite gig, ever?

It's quite hard to choose because almost all of them have been amazing. Opening for Emo Philips last December was a highlight of course. After our set he told us "I could've watched that for two hours."

Another one that stands out though was this January at Magnet Theatre in NYC. Ethan, New Michael, and myself all arrived at the theatre independently, then realised no one knew where Jack was. Vermin Supreme (a perpetual presidential candidate and performance artist) was there to do a guest cameo with us, so we expanded his role significantly when we realised Jack wasn't going to show up, and the gig went great.

During intermission, we got a message from Jack: "Sorry, I overslept. I'll start driving over now and probably arrive in time to pick up our stuff from the theatre." It was 6:30pm. In order to keep the car from getting towed, he'd fitfully slept in it until 8am, then came to the apartment where we were staying and passed out for 10 hours.

The rest of us were all very proud to have been able to adapt the show to be performed without Jack at the last minute, and no one in the audience minded. Jack arrived just as we had to load up our merch into his car, so he became basically an unpaid chauffeur that night.

Worst gig?

The booking agent who booked our tour last summer (the only thing we've ever not booked ourselves) got us a gig in Denver, like, three days beforehand, no press of course. 11 people showed up and three of them were my relatives who I hadn't seen in about 20 years. The show went OK, considering. It was our smallest audience ever.

We bombed exactly once in our career, when we did a 400-seat rock hall in Cincinnati, with no press. 40 people came and laughed about as often as Monty Python's famous pepperpots did. We're not sure what they were expecting but it was probably a lot closer to morning TV shows than we are.

The weirdest gig experience?

One time this guy filmed our show and put it in a movie on Netflix but cut out almost all of the funny parts. THAT was very weird!

Another one that stands out was the time we did a show at a community college in Western Massachusetts in 2012, which attracted a man who I can only describe as crazy and scary. During the audience talkback, he kept interrupting to nonsensically comment on our "I DON'T WANT YOUR PITY" shirts, saying things like "WHOSE PITY? YOUR PITY?" and when we tried to move on to other questions, wouldn't stop talking and getting more agitated.

Eventually, we ended the show and all rushed away, grateful that there was a security guard nearby.

Who's been the biggest influence on Asperger's Are Us?

Airplane!, Kids In The Hall, Steven Wright, and Bibendum the Michelin Man.

Is there one routine/gag/sketch you loved, that audiences didn't?

That could be the title of our autobiography, Sketches we Loved that the Audience Didn't. The nice thing is, there are so many gags in every sketch, that even if the audience misses 80% of them, they still laugh a lot.

One that stands out to me is shown in the Netflix documentary. We had a superhero character named Overthinker Man, whose only 'power' was being indecisive. As he's overthinking something, Ethan bursts out of the curtain from between Overthinker Man's legs and makes the decision immediately. Then Jack says "Thanks, Thinker Man," the joke being that Overthinker Man not only thinks too much but is also literally over Thinker Man. This is the kind of subtle joke that only 1% of the audience will pick up on, but, when they do, they love it.

The nice thing about our shows is that each joke like that appeals to a different 1%, so everyone feels like there's an inside joke between them and us.

What's your best insider travel tip, for gigging comics?

Never pay to sleep anywhere. If you do enough advance preparation, you can get friends of friends, fans, or couch-surfing hosts to give you free couches or floors to sleep on, on tour. DIY is the only way to make a living in this business without a TV show. We do literally everything ourselves (except for performing - you're in for a surprise at the show!) from booking, travel, accounting, and, of course, writing.

The most memorable review, heckle or post-gig reaction?

A recent one that stands out was on Twitter: "Just saw @aspergersareus in Beverly Massachusetts for the second time, amazing as always! Everyone should see them. The Netflix was wrong!!!"

Which is what we've always wanted everyone to say, instead of focusing on the greeting card-style of the documentary.

But another story we always tell is the time we were rehearsing at my old apartment in Salem, MA, the night before our second-ever show. We did a sketch that involved calling the police, where one of us has to yell "Help! I'm being beaten and robbed!"

It was hot that day, so the windows were open. As we were wrapping up, three police cars were outside my door; someone had called them to report a robbery. We explained we were rehearsing, then one of them said "weren't you in the newspaper yesterday?" and that was the first time in our entire career that we got recognised by strangers, from our first newspaper article.

The next day in the police blotter there was a listing about the police being called to my address for a possible robbery. "Upon arrival it was determined that the parties involved were rehearsing for a play." Cops aren't very detail-oriented.

Also, there's Comedian Makes History's Funniest Donation

How do you feel about where your careers are at, right now?

We're so happy and excited to be performing in the British Isles! Our Denmark and Germany shows went beyond our wildest expectations and we're hoping to just tour bigger and bigger venues every year. We're also planning to make some more long-form video stuff that we can't talk about yet.

But of course our eventual goal is to headline the O2 for ten sold-out shows like Monty Python did. We've always felt they were our main competition, and that's the only thing left to make us as big as they are, now that we've also had a hit movie and our fifth member has passed away.

The UK tour kicks off on Saturday. For details visit aspergersareus.com (dates and tickets). They're also at facebook.com/aspergersareus