“Are You Acoustic?”: Meme Culture and the Erasure of Disabled People

By Summer Lewis

“Is he… y’know… acoustic?”

It’s said when someone says something a little off, or acts in a way that doesn’t quite fit. The word hangs in the air like a punchline in waiting, a joke you’re expected to laugh out or you’re the bad guy. It's not a real question. No one is confused. Everyone already knows what the speaker means. And that's the point. 

If you don’t laugh you’re the friend who’s too serious. Too online. Too “need to touch grass.”

You see it everywhere now: group chats, classrooms, on TikTok, in real life. A sideways glance, a smirk, and a word that’s just close enough to sound like confusion while safely cloaked in mockery. Acoustic. Artistic. A little Rain Man-coded. The language shifts, but the joke stays the same: it’s weird to be autistic, and even weirder to say so.

It might seem harmless. Just Gen Z slang. Just a meme. Just a joke.

But it’s not a joke if you’re the one being laughed at.

This is how disability is treated in public discourse: not with curiosity or care, but with discomfort disguised as humor. If you’re visibly struggling, you’re a burden. If you’re successful, you’re faking. And in between, you’re just awkward enough to be turned into a meme. Even our most famous disabled icons, people like Helen Keller or Stevie Wonder, aren’t safe from this kind of erasure. They’re called fake, exaggerated, impossible. Tools and technologies that help disabled people live independently are marketed like novelty gifts. Representations of disability are played for laughs, looped on TikTok until nothing real is left.

This isn’t about one joke. It’s about the cultural pattern that turns disability into a punchline and how that punchline quietly chips away at the humanity behind it.

Even when disability is represented in mainstream media, it’s rarely treated with respect for long. If a disabled character appears on screen, they’re often framed as tragic, magical, or pitiable and when they aren’t, audiences create new ways to laugh at them anyway. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the meme-ification of autistic characters and language.

When The Good Doctor debuted in 2017, it was promoted as a landmark moment for autism representation in network TV: a show centered on Dr. Shaun Murphy, a young autistic surgeon played by Freddie Highmore. While the show has always drawn criticism from autistic viewers for its clinical, over-dramatized approach, it was at least a rare attempt to put an autistic character in a position of authority and respect.

Then came the meme.

In one episode, Dr. Murphy has a heated argument with a colleague and yells, “I am a surgeon!” The scene was serious in context about confidence, validation, and identity. But online, the clip was stripped of its emotional weight and turned into a joke format: looped, distorted, parodied. TikToks spliced it with goofy audio. Twitter threads used it as a punchline. YouTube remixes turned Shaun’s line into mock-operatic declarations.

What was once an earnest portrayal of autistic emotion became a meme about overreaction and awkwardness.

The subtext is clear: Shaun isn’t cool or relatable. he’s weird. His voice, facial expressions, and cadence are all traits often associated with autism and they become the joke itself. The meme doesn’t mock the writing. It mocks him.

“Persons with disabilities, when they feature at all, continue to be all too often portrayed as either remarkable and heroic, or dependent victims [2].” 

Even when we’re written into the story, we’re not always welcome in the audience.

If you’ve spent time online, you’ve likely seen the phrase: “Is he acoustic?”

It shows up when someone behaves oddly, uses flat affect, stims, or says something offbeat. It’s a joke pretending to be a misunderstanding a way to ask if someone’s autistic without actually saying the word. But make no mistake: it’s not about confusion. It’s about mockery.

The punchline hinges on two things:

1. That autism is something so uncomfortable or socially unacceptable that you have to joke your way around it.

2. That autistic people are inherently funny not because of anything they do, but because of how they exist.

This isn’t new. Versions of this joke have circulated for years:

• “Is he artistic?”

• “Like Rain Man?”

• “Oh, so you’re quirky.”

It’s a deflection, a way to acknowledge autism without respecting it. Instead of asking thoughtful questions or simply accepting the label, people make it into a gag. The end result? Neurodivergent people are left feeling like they can’t talk about themselves without becoming someone else’s punchline.

Language shapes culture. If the only way we talk about autism is through puns and punchlines, it’s no wonder so many people still think of it as a joke.

Some of the most helpful accessibility tools ever marketed were sold as jokes. Not because they were ridiculous but because companies couldn’t stomach the idea of associating their product with actual disabled people.

Instead, they sold them to the public as punchlines.

Watch any “As Seen On TV” infomercial and you’ll notice a pattern: a perfectly able-bodied person struggles in the most over-the-top way imaginable. They spill juice. They fall trying to put on socks. They can’t open a jar to save their life. Cue dramatic black-and-white footage and a narrator asking: “Is this you?”

What they’re really asking is: Are you lazy? Clumsy? Incompetent?

What they’re not asking is: Are you disabled?

Because they can’t. Accessibility doesn’t sell but pity does. So instead of showing someone with arthritis using a one-touch jar opener, they show a “quirky white mom” who just can’t get the lid off. Instead of marketing Snuggies as a great tool for wheelchair users or people with chronic pain, they show someone in a recliner who’s “too lazy” to use a blanket the normal way. Instead of presenting a juice bottle pourer as essential for someone who can’t bear weight on their wrists, they pretend it’s for people who are “just too extra.”

Disability is erased on purpose. Because to advertisers, normalcy is aspirational, and need is shameful.

Snuggies were a viral joke in the early 2010s, but for many wheelchair users, they’re ideal easy to drape, no sleeves to struggle with, and warm without requiring contortion. Juice bottle pourers may look like clunky plastic nonsense in commercials, but they’re a lifeline for people with arthritis, chronic pain, or limited grip strength, letting you pour without lifting a heavy jug. The same goes for one-handed can openers, automatic egg crackers, and spill guards tools designed with hand tremors, limb differences, or muscular limitations in mind, yet too often sold as if they’re meant for bumbling sitcom characters or clumsy dads.

Instead of empowering the people who actually use them, the products are wrapped in irony. They’re marketed as “funny gifts” or “boomer gadgets,” not as accessibility tools. The idea that someone might actually need these things? Never acknowledged.

And because we laughed, we missed the point.

There’s a quiet calculation many disabled people do before disclosing anything:Am I disabled enough to be believed?

If you’re articulate, people assume you must not be autistic.If you can stand up from your wheelchair, people whisper that you must not really need it.If you hold a job, go to school, or crack a joke, people question whether you’re faking the whole thing.

This isn’t just cruelty. It’s a cultural script: disabled people are only “real” when they’re tragic. When they’re visibly suffering. When they’re helpless, sad, or inspirational, but never messy, complex, or ordinary.

Disability is supposed to look a certain way. And when it doesn’t, people panic. Or worse they laugh.

“I think we’re getting to a place where we’re allowing disabled characters to be fully realized people, and that’s wonderful […] but at the same time, there’s still so much work to be done [1].”  

If you're succeeding, you're seen as suspicious. If you're not visibly struggling, your pain must not be real. The same internet that turns disabled celebrities into memes and assistive devices into punchlines does the same to everyday people. And this disbelief cuts deep.

An autistic person who masks their symptoms to survive the workplace is told they’re “too high functioning” to need accommodations, while a chronically ill person who uses a mobility aid one day but not the next is accused of faking it. At the same time, a disabled creator who becomes popular online is flooded with comments like, “You don’t look disabled.”

That’s the double bind: you’re either “disabled enough” to be believed but treated as incapable, or you’re capable enough to function and therefore assumed to be lying.

There is no room for complexity. No room for fluctuation. No room for success without suspicion.

And certainly, no room to be funny, or fashionable, or successful, or desired without someone, somewhere, muttering, “I bet they’re faking.”

It starts as a joke.

A meme.

A funny line.

“Is he acoustic?”

“I bet he can walk.”

“I am a surgeon.”

But none of it stays online. These jokes leak into real life, into real attitudes, and into real systems. They shape how we treat people who we believe, who we help, who we laugh at, and who we quietly erase.

When disability is always the punchline, it stops being taken seriously.

It becomes entertainment. It becomes suspicious. It becomes shame.

And in that environment, needing help becomes something you have to defend. Every time a disabled person uses a tool, asks for an accommodation, or dares to succeed, they risk being doubted. Or mocked. Or dismissed. We’ve created a culture where accessibility is sold as a novelty, disabled icons are called liars, and simply saying you’re autistic invites ridicule.

Why is disability only palatable when it’s tragic?

Why do we embrace fictional portrayals of disability but reject the real thing?

Why do we still act like disabled people need to prove they’re real?

Maybe it’s not that disability is hard to believe.

Maybe it’s that believing it requires us to change how we design, how we listen, how we care.

And for some people, it’s just easier to laugh.

Disability isn’t unbelievable. It’s just inconvenient for people who’d rather laugh than understand.

Works Cited

1. A Conversation with Keah Brown. Power. Influence. Change., Disability Lead, 1 May 2020. Medium, https://medium.com/disability-power-and-influence/disability-power-series-965213f7fc20. Accessed 14 Aug. 2025

2. “Common Portrayals of Persons with Disabilities.” MediaSmarts, Canadian digital media literacy organization, https://mediasmarts.ca/digital-media-literacy/media-issues/diversity-media/persons-disabilities/common-portrayals-persons-disabilities. Accessed 14 Aug. 2025.