Here’s my suggestion, spend a day with a family with an autistic child. Then find a joke for us.
owl – you don’t know that s/he doesn’t. the fact is that there is nothing wrong with the joking per se. it is coming on with no context, without the listeners knowing your negius, and making a joke. we all may have responded differently had an op started a thread this way, “After a trip to the fruit store with my autistic son i had the funniest thought . . .”
or
“after spending days sifting through ‘autism research’ with other parents, I have drawn the conclusion that the real cause of autism was the creation of Thomas cartoons”