fb-pixelMaking of ‘Asperger’s Are Us’ drew director into comedy troupe’s world - The Boston Globe Skip to main content

Making of ‘Asperger’s Are Us’ drew director into comedy troupe’s world

From left: Noah Britton, New Michael Ingemi, Jack Hanke, and Ethan Finlan make up the comedy troupe Asperger’s Are Us.Michele McDonald for the Boston Globe

For filmmaker Alex Lehmann, it took an old joke to earn the trust of his new documentary subjects. The four — Noah, Jack, Ethan, and the one who calls himself New Michael — are the members of the Massachusetts-based comedy troupe called Asperger’s Are Us. As young men on the autism spectrum, they were especially wary at first about the intentions of “some guy from LA” who wanted to make a movie, as Lehmann recalls.

So he tried making them laugh.

“It’s hard to explain puns to kleptomaniacs,” the joke goes, “because they always take things literally.”

That got them. The four members of Asperger’s Are Us specialize in two types of comedy: wordplay (like the kleptomaniac joke) and farcical sketches (they’re big Monty Python fans).

Advertisement



After earning raves at the SXSW Film Festival earlier this year, Lehmann’s feature-length documentary, also called “Asperger’s Are Us,” begins streaming Sunday on Netflix; a DVD will be released Thursday. The group’s next local gig is at the Improv Asylum on Jan. 15.

The director says he had no experience with people on the spectrum before he clicked on an article about the troupe while doing some research. Once the performers decided they’d be OK with the filmmaker telling their story, they let him in on the big show they were planning.

One of their members, Jack, was preparing to study abroad at Oxford, and the group was set to rehearse fresh material for a farewell show at the Cambridge YMCA. They proposed that Lehmann follow the process for the film.

“They presented that premise to me as if they were the writers,” says Lehmann.

Jack Hanke, Ethan Finlan, and New Michael Ingemi, all now in their mid-20s, first met as 12-year-old middle school students, when they attended a day camp for young people on the spectrum. Noah Britton, who is 10 years older than the others, was a counselor there.

Advertisement



Now a psychology professor at Bunker Hill Community College, Britton was instrumental in organizing the comedy troupe. (He also has a punk band.) With his partners now adults, he says, Asperger’s Are Us has become a “unanimocracy.”

His own realization that he probably had Asperger’s syndrome came during a class about disabilities that he took while an undergrad at Boston University. “I skipped home,” Britton recalls in the documentary. “I never felt freer.”

On the phone from his home in Somerville, Britton explains that feeling. With a diagnosis, he now had an explanation for all those times people told him he’d said the wrong thing, or acted inappropriately.

The others in the group, all a decade younger than Britton (he’s 34 now), have grown up in a world that has become rapidly more aware of the telltale signs of Asperger’s — lack of eye contact, difficulty recognizing social cues, deep and narrow fields of interest. That wasn’t the case when Britton was a child. He had to figure it out on his own. For that, he says, he’s grateful.

It was Hans Asperger himself, the pediatrician who identified the developmental disorder that bears his name, who first noted the sense of humor common to many Aspies.

When Britton was young, he “logically analyzed what is OK to laugh at,” he says. He concluded that it wouldn’t be right to find humor in a situation in which “someone is the butt of the joke, because that is mean. So what is left? Wordplay, and absurdism — things that are obviously not true.”

Advertisement



Several scenes in the documentary follow the performers as they work out preposterous scenarios. In one bit that made the sketch show, Finlan — who has an affinity for trains and train schedules — plays a president taking questions at a press conference. He’s being grilled for having married a train.

Their kids, he hopes, will take after their mother, who “is always on time,” rather than their father, who is “delayed.”

For his first full-length documentary project, Lehmann enlisted the help of the Duplass brothers, the production team behind the HBO series “Togetherness.” The film was nearly complete when he brought it to Mark Duplass, who made a few key suggestions and then “helped me get it out there.”

“It’s a story about these guys going for it, doing it, not being afraid to be themselves,” says Lehmann, who met Duplass while working as a cameraman on the FX comedy “The League.” “Those are the kinds of scenes Mark relates to in a lot of the movies he makes.”

Over the course of filming, Lehmann and the comedians became genuine friends. It helped that, working on a shoestring budget, the director doubled as his own cameraman; he was usually the only other guy in the room.

With “Asperger’s Are Us” completed, Lehmann brought a production crew out on tour with the troupe last summer. Crammed into an old RV, they covered 6,000 miles while the four comics — by now nationally recognized as the only act of their kind — headlined 18 shows. Lehmann hopes to turn the footage into a second film project.

Advertisement



Not all of his early jokes landed like the one about kleptomaniacs, he says. Once, facing four expressionless faces after another attempt at humor fell flat, he responded, “All right, I guess I’ll just leave the comedy to you guys.”

For Ingemi in particular, that was funny. Now he says it all the time.

“Just leave the comedy to us!”

Asperger’s Are Us

On: Netflix, streaming Sunday


James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @sullivanjames.