Maeve Press was a baby when she was first put under special education observation. “I was not at the level of an average nine-month-old. I was at the level of an average foetus at that point. I couldn’t roll. I couldn’t babble.” For the next 17 years, unbeknownst to her, professionals diligently wrote reports that highlighted everything wrong with her.
“When I graduated high school, my mum gave me the box of all of the reports,” remembers Press. “I sat with them for a bit, overwhelmed. I remember being six-years-old and running around in the backyard and that didn’t seem like a negative, but now it’s being written as one. It was weird. But mostly, it was just funny to realise how many things I couldn’t do. And so I wrote a show with them.”
Now a successful comedian and actress (check her out in Apple TV+’s Everything‘s Gonna Be Okay) Press makes her Edinburgh Fringe debut this year by unboxing her childhood, as seen from the outside. It’s one of a wave of shows at 2024’s festival that highlight and discuss neurodiversity.
There’s Blaire Postman’s Lady ADHD, Joe Wells’ Daddy Autism, Baby Belle’s intersectional Young, Dumb and Full of Autism, Arielle Dundas’s Hyperactivity Disorder. The Edinburgh Fringe booking site even has a “neurodiversity-led” filter, enabling visitors to explore this flowering of conversations around thinking differently.
This will be the third year Pierre Novellie (the comedian and writer, whose credits include The Mash Report, Spitting Image and Mock the Week) has talked on stage about his experience of being “neurospicy”. He was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder as an adult, after a heckler in Bristol told him: “I have Asperger’s. And I think you have Asperger’s.”
Novellie credits his friend, Scottish comedian Fern Brady, as the “trailblazer” who kickstarted the new openness around neurodiversity, for her 2021 show Autistic Bikini Queen. “But more generally, I think the reason people are talking about it is because now they know – and pre-Covid, they didn’t know.”
Pierre Novellie will appear at Edinburgh Fringe later this month. Image: Matt Stronge
Lockdown was a “very different” experience for many autistic people, Novellie says. “From my point of view, a lot of people reacted as though they were like it like a claustrophobic person being shoved into a coffin. But I really enjoyed a lot of aspects of it.
“I think people just spent lockdown finding it out [they were autistic]. Since I got diagnosed, I have helped three or four people I know get diagnosed.”
Both Novellie and Press say being neurodivergent makes them better comedians. “The act of creativity and joke-writing rewards sideways thinking leaps of logic, strange points of view, unusual preferences and just general weirdness,” Novellie explains. “Jokes are basically little machines made of language that you have to endlessly tinker with and refine. And that plays into spectrummy hands.”
“I don’t think you could do this if your frame was not a little bit… different,” Press agrees. “All the different things going on in my head and all those ADHD thoughts were actually what led me creatively.”
For Press – comedy started as a defence mechanism, a way of turning the mean things people would say to her advantage. “My first beginning of comedy was when I was in fifth grade,” she recalls. “I was given a math test. And I raised a hand and asked a question. The teacher came over to me, and she flipped the test to the back and wrote, in crayon, very simple ‘one-plus-one, two-plus-two’ questions. I was like, this doesn’t feel right.
“I told my mum about it when she picked me up, and she started laughing. That’s when I realised all these things that were wrong with me, all of it was fuel for comedy. No one could say anything that could hurt my feelings, because all of it just felt like a really good punchline.”
While Novellie says comedy is an “ideal” job for people with autism and ADHD, the experience of Edinburgh in August – overpowering for almost everyone – can cause issues. Award-winning Scottish comedian and internet personality Gary Meikle recently posted a video explaining why he won’t be at this year’s festival. “I’ve done the Edinburgh Fringe,” he says. “Back then I didn’t know that I was neurospicy and I spent the entire month being constantly overwhelmed and overstimulated. So it was hell.”
It can be a lot, Novellie confirms. “It definitely helps that there are performers’ bars,” he says. “If you’ve been doing the Edinburgh Fringe for as long as I have, you know the secret routes, and you never go on the [Royal] Mile if you can avoid it.”
Despite the conversations happening in the arts, understanding around autism and other forms of neurodiversity is still “close to zero” for most people, littered with “misunderstandings and out-of-date stereotypes”, Novellie says. “You go to a school yard and I bet you there’s an autistic kid getting his fucking head kicked in as we speak.”
Not content with breaking those preconceptions from the stage, Novellie has just written a book that also uses comedy to educate. He has a modest – but potentially life-changing, if you’re that kid in the school yard – goal for Why Can’t I Just Enjoy Things? A Comedian’s Guide to Autism.
“The greatest goal for me, as a very boring pragmatist, would be if autism could attain the same level of understanding as a peanut allergy,” he says. “Consider the difference between now and 25 years ago for people with peanut allergies – the level of consideration and concern. That would be enormous for autism, or neurodivergence more broadly. Peanut-allergy-level awareness. That’s the crown jewel.”
Maeve Press: Failure Confetti ison at the Edinburgh Fring at Studio Four, Assembly George Square Studios from 31 July-25 August (13.20pm). Pierre Novellie: Must We?, is on at the Edinburgh Fringe at Monkey Barrel 3 from 29 July-25 August (19.05pm)
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