Finally, we must remember that teasing, like so many things, gets better with age. Starting at around age ten or eleven, children become much more sophisticated in their abilities to endorse contradictory propositions about objects in the world—they move from Manichaean, either/or, black-or-white reasoning to a more ironic, complex understanding of the world. As a result, as any chagrined parent will tell you, they add irony and sarcasm to their social repertoire. One sees, at this age, a precipitous twofold drop in the reported incidences of bullying. And this shift in the ability to understand and communicate irony and sarcasm should shift the tenor of teasing in reliable fashion.
To document this, we created an opportunity for boys at two different developmental stages to taunt one another at a basketball camp. The camp was run by my former student, aptly named John Tauer—a former Division III star small forward at the University of St. Thomas. During the camp’s morning drills, two boys, who did not know each other but were matched according to their basketball skills, were called over to play the “pressure cooker.” In this drill each camper was to try to make a free throw with the game on the line: If he made the shot, his team would win, and if he missed, his team would lose. Each camper’s partner was to act like a fan for fifteen seconds prior to the critical shot, much as NBA players must perform amid the taunting coming from the stands. In the taunt condition, the fan was given the task of messing with the shooter’s mind for fifteen seconds, to try to make him miss. In the cheer condition, the fan was to say encouraging things, to bolster the spirits of the shooter. The fan acted this out in a taped square that measured two feet by two feet and was located at the end of the left side of the free-throw line, a couple feet away from the shooter.
Sure enough, our subjects acted like besotted NBA fans. The taunters made more than ten times as many harsh gestures as those cheering their peers on. The taunters pointed and stuck out their tongues, they growled and snarled, they glared like alpha apes. The cheering fans, in contrast, took their cue straight out of a self-esteem handbook: They were five times as likely to shout encouraging things, to clap, and to cheer the shooter on. And there, in the fifteen-second episode of taunting, and only in the taunting, we saw the exquisite use of off-record markers. The taunters, and only the taunters, shifted their pitch, taunting in very high or low tones, they resorted to repetition (“you’re gonna miss, you’re gonna miss, you’re gonna miss), and they used basketball metaphors (“brick” “choke”) that were absent in the more sincere cheer condition.
The fourteen-to fifteen-year-old boys taunted with just as much hostile behavior—the finger points and harsh vocalizations—as the ten-to eleven-year-old boys, but the older boys’ taunting was accompanied much more frequently by off-record markers—repetition, shifts in vocalizations, metaphors—that signaled the presence of play. And to good effect. Our older campers, deft taunters that they were, were more likely than the older boys in the cheer condition to report their partner as a new friend. In the aftermath of the taunt and the shot, whether a make or a miss, the two boys’ laughter would become intertwined. They would nudge each other in the shoulder or get into friendly headlocks. They would push each other gently and sometimes walk to the next station with an arm draped on the new friend’s shoulder.
PARALLEL PLAY
There are still many mysteries to Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition defined by typically developing or accelerated language and cognitive abilities but profound difficulties in the social realm, and in connecting with and understanding others. Why is it three to four times more common in young boys than girls? Is it a disorder? Or should it be thought of as just another hue in the human spectrum?
There is no mystery to the heart of the condition, as revealed in the brilliant essay by music critic Tim Page, who has lived his life with Asperger’s. It is a condition defined by early single-minded preoccupations—in Page’s case, maps of towns in Massachusetts, obituaries, memorizing most of the 1961 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia, and the music of Scottish comedian Harry Lauder (he publicly declared his contempt for the Beatles in his school newspaper). It is manifest in an unusual social style—often defined by a monotone voice, a lack of eye contact, a revulsion to touch, and fearless social oddities (Page liked to wear rabbit’s feet in each buttonhole of his shirt). It is no wonder that Page found Emily Post’s Etiquette an epiphany, a step-by-step manual for entering into the social complexities of the human race.
At the same time, the disinterested disregard for others can yield prodigious talents. Hans Asperger, the Viennese pediatrician who helped chart the nature of the condition, observed, “For success in science or art, a dash of autism is essential.” For Page, it led to deep insights into music. After hearing Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians in 1976, he was catapulted into a five-year study of minimalism in contemporary music that led to his career as a music critic. He observed that Reich had achieved the musical equivalent of imposing a frame upon a moving river.
At childhood birthday parties Page felt deeper empathy for the piñata than his sugar-juiced peers. In his teens, when in the close confines of interested young girls, he would chatter on without making eye contact. Later he confessed to making love like the Tin Man. About his understanding of others, Page writes: “I am left with the melancholy sensation that my life has been spent in a perpetual state of parallel play, alongside, but distinctly apart from, the rest of humanity.”
What proves to be difficult for Asperger’s children are the tools of social connection, all those contributors to the numerator of the jen ratio—eye contact, gentle touch, the understanding of others’ minds, embarrassment or love, imaginative play with others, greeting smiles with smiles, antiphonal laughter. And teasing, as revealed in a study I conducted with my friend and colleague Lisa Capps. If teasing is a dramatic performance, one that requires nonliteral language, where affections, conflicts, commitments, and identities are playfully negotiated, this should be particularly difficult for Asperger’s children. They have difficulties in imaginative play, pretense, taking others’ perspectives, and the elements of the tease, in particular nonliteral communication.
In our study we visited the homes of Asperger’s children and their mothers, as well as the homes of comparison children and their mothers. We asked the children to recount experiences of teasing. We then had them tease each other with the nickname paradigm. Our children were 10.8 years old, on average—the very age that children’s capacities for multiple representations and irony come on line and teasing transforms into a pleasurable social drama. Our comparison children described experiences of teasing that had many positive flavors, in which they navigated the connections and moral notions of preteen life. The Asperger’s children, in contrast, recounted experiences that were largely negative, and made little reference to connection and community. When we coded the brief teasing exchanges between parents and child, we found out why. Asperger’s children were just as hostile in their teasing of their mothers as comparison children, but they showed none of the nonliteral gems of an artful tease—exaggeration, repetition, prosodic shifts, funny facial expressions, imitations, iconic gestures, metaphor. These difficulties with the tease, we also found, could be attributed to the child’s difficulties with taking others’ perspectives.