Both the cases above represented patients with frontal lesions from brain trauma and neurodegenerative disease. Figuring out the brain issues that lead to this compulsive jesting and merriment can help us understand how the brain processes humor-a particularly human behavior psychologists and other researchers still don’t entirely understand. Still, joke addiction is serious business. These men did not die of laughter, and it sounds like their friends and family were excessively patient with them. When he died, the man’s autopsy showed that he had Pick’s disease, a form of dementia, that resulted in severe atrophy of the frontal lobes of his brain.
His sense of humor was entirely personal. Like the aforementioned pun-lover, though, he didn’t find other people’s jesting amusing. He disco-danced during one visit to the clinic to meet with the researchers, grabbing the ties of passing physicians and comparing them on another visit. He “would frequently break out in laughter, almost cackling, at his own comments, opinions, or jokes, many of which were borderline sexual or political in content,” the researchers describe. He was let go after he blurted “Who the hell chose this God-awful place?” at work. In the second case studied, a 57-year-old with dementia got fired from his job for his inability to quash his jokester persona. But his own quips-like “How do you cure hunger? Step away from the buffet table!”-he couldn’t stop giggling at. On a multiple choice test in the lab, he could identify the punch lines of jokes, but didn’t laugh or find them funny. He laughed incessantly at his own jokes, yet he struggled to find other people’s jokes funny. In what was later attributed to a stroke, he became so obsessed with making jokes and puns that it began to wear on his relationship with his wife. Five years after the episode, his compulsion turned toward comedy. He would dig through dumpsters to try to find recyclables, and hoard napkins from restaurants. He became compulsive, particularly about recycling. Ten years before he visited the lab, this man suffered a brain hemorrhage that changed his behavior. When she complained, he wrote them down instead-accumulating 50 pages of puns and poop jokes that he later revealed to the researchers. Coming up with puns is pathological.įor five years, one man, an anonymous 69-year-old, would wake his wife up in the middle of the night to tell her jokes he’d come up with. In two case studies by a pair of UCLA brain researchers recently published in the Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, the subjects' brain trauma and dementia led to what the scientists describe as “intractable joking.” Called Witzelsucht (German for "joke addiction"), excessive joking is a real neurological disease. But for some people, joking can become a compulsion. It’s generally a good thing to have a sense of humor.
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