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Comment by yhoneycomb | Hacker News Reader

Just curious could you give examples of them being witty?

Different situation but I have a 6yo with downs and this rings true to me.

He’s always trying to crack a joke. He’ll say loudly “good night Uschi!” (his grandmother’s nickname) to my wife with a grin on his face like he made the funniest joke. Not Seinfeld over here but we laugh pretty hard.

Always wanting to subvert serious situation. For example... me being in a bad mood having to get up at 5.00am to milk the cows, and this Downs boy looking up at me with a crazy big-ass grin that would completely wipe all sour thoughts from my mind.

They play with language in a very disarming manner. Not highbrow, but will find compelling nicknames for their loved ones and deliver them in a way that is difficult not to be drawn in by.

That's so true about playing with language...

We had a resident with Downs who needed assistance every day ...

But he got tired always asking "You help me?"... and started saying "I help you!" (and laughed)...

We knew what he meant & came over ... he got a kick out of swapping his pronouns :)

That's all very nice, but it isn't wit.

Comedy is extremely situational — first scene in first episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer made somebody dying funny — so if OP says someone was witty when they did something, they almost certainly were.

I think wit is in the eye of the beholder as well. For the record, wit is typically defined as a form of verbal humor, so it's not really the same thing as situational comedy.

And this might also be a case of one's expectations. If you spent your entire week teaching preschool, and then on the weekend met up with some adults for drinks later, you might come out of that evening with the thought that those were some of the most urbane sophisticated people you'd ever met.

Yeah... because you spend the vast majority of your day preventing toddlers from sticking crayons up their noses. It's the intellectual equivalent of the ebbinghaus illusion.

I've always pondered the "genetic utility" if you will of downs folks. I could imagine they play a real "symbiotic relationship" with their familial cohorts bringing lighthearted joy and other social softeners that add brightness to a group. It does come with costs however like people say with lifetime care, but the fact that these loving genetic subpopulations persist makes me wonder if they are not in fact anomalies but part of a richer fabric.

You are suggesting that a parent who has an offspring with Down Syndrome is likely to have more survining descendants than the average human?

Probably not... but ancillary benefits like this can lower the selective pressure against trisomy 21, so that it's less likely to go away.

That's the thing. Something rare like Down Syndrome only has a very small selective pressure against it, and it's really easy for other effects to remove a fraction of it.

So things that seem ridiculous like this assertion or the "super uncle" theory about homosexuality are not so easily dismissed when one really thinks about them. Of course, there can be selective benefits from genes with a propensity for (forming trisomy 21, having homosexual individuals, etc) when the specific condition doesn't manifest.

My uncle sometimes puts his shoes on the wrong feet and once managed to put his jeans on backwards (buttoned but not zipped behind him). As he walked past the doorway my mom (his sister) said, "Your pants are on backwards!"

Without missing a beat, he countered, "Maybe I was going the other way..." and sort of moonwalked back the way he came.

That's hilarious!

this is too funny haha, thanks

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