[JohnBooty]

    And we learn it totally alone. What behavior is 
    and is not appropriate is one big stochastic 
    experiment that lasts your entire life

This is heartbreakingly true.

But for the specific case of this hypothetical example, and the slightly more generalized example of "what kind of humor might appeal to strangers to whom I've just introduced myself" it's actually kind of an easy lesson.

The answer is that you have to know somebody before you know what kind of humor is going to be cool with them.

And the answer is also that interrupting strangers to tell them jokes or even to simply say "hello" is likely to be rude, unless it's an social situation as opposed to just like, stopping your CEO in the hallway at 2PM on a Tuesday.

Those are the sorts of lessons everybody has to learn, autism or no. As somebody who's probably a bit on the spectrum himself I understand the struggle to an extent, but also it feels like the actually relevant lessons here in this specific case are pretty learnable even if we might learn them the hard way at first.