NTs taking things literally

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About a month ago my sister was accusing me of being racist. I jokingly said that she spends too much time on tumblr.

Today she noticed that I was on tumblr. She accused me of being a hypocrite and got all weird. I joked about making fun of social justice warriors, but she interpreted that as me being a cyber bully.

I told her that I was just joking, but she kept insisting that I was dead serious. I wasn't. What I meant by making fun of them was reading their ridiculous posts for fun, none of that involves any cyber bullying.

I'm starting to think my sister is the real Aspie.

I think it might be your tone of voice that made her think that. This happens to me a lot. My voice is somewhat monotonic, so people have difficulty telling whether I'm serious or joking.

OR, she might be joking but you misunderstood it, which happens to me a lot, too.

People in general tend to have a hard time telling when I'm joking & that's a common thing with us Aspies.

Even NTs make mistakes. I remember last year during a training course for work, we were going through the answers on a worksheet we completed. The tutor was funny and jokey and everyone liked her. When we got to one of the questions, after a few seconds of discussing the question, the tutor joked about the answer, and some of us (including me) knew she was joking, while half the group looked down at their papers worriedly. The tutor had to tell them that she was only teasing, and they were like "oh", then laughed at themselves for misinterpreting the joke.

Also I think all NTs take those figure of speech things literally when they first hear them, especially children. When my NT cousin was about 10 she was teasing me about something, and I said "stop pulling my leg", and she said "how am I pulling your leg? I'm not even touching you", so I had to explain to her what it meant, and she was pleased that she had just learnt something.

People do this to me. I think it must be my tone of voice and lack of expression. It's still kind of annoying though, especially when what I'm saying is totally outlandish. Like, do they really think I'd be serious about something so ridiculous? I could probably try to make the sarcasm really over exaggerated in my voice, but half of the joke is the fact that I sound serious. They just don't get it -_-

It took me forever to learn not to be so deadpan when telling a joke. I still have problems with it but not like before. It used to be that the more likely result was to leave people puzzled trying to figure out if I was serious or joking.