As April is Autism Awareness Month, and Jimmy Kimmel and YouTuber Mark Rober are teaming up to set up a three hour virtual event to raise money to help NEXT For Autism, a non-profit organization that designs programs to help improve the lives of people with Autism Spectrum Disorder, or ASD.
The event lineup boasts some of today's most widely-known comedians and content creators, and will feature everything from comedy skits and musical performances, to DIY science projects.
Special guests for the event will include familiar faces from fan favorites like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Adam Sandler, Jack Black, Terry Crews, and Andy Samberg, to name a few. And from the content creator fandom, Mr. Beast, Rhett and Link and Marques Brownlee.
Rober, who was once a NASA engineer and is now a popular content creator on YouTube, with more than 17 million subscribers, has a pretty special reason for supporting Autism awareness: his son.
While he's pretty protective of his family on videos from his YouTube channel, he gave everyone a sneak peek into life with a child who has special needs to provide a better understanding of how children, teens and adults with autism deal with the unique challenges they face.
"Basically, people with autism don't have a filter in their brain like the rest of us," the YouTube star said in his recent video about autism. "While most of us have the ability to filter out background noise and even other voices, people with autism don't have the ability to put all that in the background. They hear everything going on around them, every voice, sound, irritation, nuance comes at them all at the same time."
Autism affects one in every fifty-four children, and even more adults - since diagnoses are easier to make when someone is young, and psychologists are still learning about the disorder itself, it's hard to say exactly how many citizens it affects - but we know it's far more than are recorded, and even more than people previously suspected above that number.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, one in every fifty four children will be diagnosed with autism before age eight. In the DSM-5 - the standard manual psychologists use for diagnosis - Autism Spectrum Disorder, or ASD, is described as "the persistent impairment of social interaction and restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviors, interests, or activities.
Michelle and Robert Smigel, who will help produce the event along with Kimmel's team. according to Deadline, had to cancel their run at a fundraiser last year. "Night Of Too Many Stars" with Jon Stewart was cancelled this year due to the coronavirus pandemic. The couple, who are themselves parents to a son with special needs, had this to say about the upcoming event.
“It’s been a year since we had to cancel our “Night of Too Many Stars” benefit and many of the programs and schools we support are hurting greatly. So we’re beyond grateful to Mark and Jimmy for making this happen for NEXT for Autism.”
Viewers will be able to interact in real time during the event on April 30th at omaze.com/nextforautism. The event will take place starting at 8p.m. EDT, and will be streamed on Rober's YouTube channel.