In a new paper, neurologists Elias D. Granadillo and Mario
F. Mendez describe two patients in whom brain disorders led to an unusual
symptom: “intractable joking.”
Patient #1 was
A 69-year-old right-handed man presented for a
neuropsychiatric evaluation because of a 5-year history of compulsive joking…
On interview, the patient reported feeling generally joyful, but his compulsive
need to make jokes and create humor had become an issue of contention with his
wife. He would wake her up in the middle
of the night bursting out in laughter, just to tell her about the jokes he had
come up with. At the request of his wife, he started writing down these jokes
as a way to avoid waking her. As a result, he brought to our office
approximately 50 pages filled with his jokes.
Granadillo and Mendez quote some of the patient’s gags:
Q: What is a pill-popping sexual molester guilty of? A: Rape
and pillage.
Went to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get my driver’s
license. They gave me an eye exam and here is what they said: ABCDEFG, HIJKMNLOP, QRS, TUV, WXY and Z; now I know my
ABC’s, can I have my license please?
The man’s comedic compulsion was attributed to a stroke,
which had damaged part of his left caudate nucleus, although an earlier lesion
to the right frontal cortex, caused by a subarachnoid hemorrhage, may have
contributed to the pathological punning. Granadillo and Mendez say that a
series of medications, including antidepressants, had little impact on his
“compulsive need to constantly make and tell jokes.”
Patient #2 was a 57-year
old man, who had become “a jokester”, a transformation that had occurred
gradually, over a three period. At the same time, the man became excessively
forward and disinhibited, making inappropriate actions and remarks. He
eventually lost his job after asking “Who the hell chose this God-awful place?”
The patient constantly told jokes and couldn’t stop laughing
at them. However, he did not seem to find other people’s jokes funny at all.
The man’s case, however, came to a sad end. His behavior
continued to deteriorate and he developed symptoms of Parkinson’s. He died
several years later. The diagnosis was Pick’s disease, a rare form of dementia.
A post mortem revealed widespread neurodegeneration: “frontotemporal atrophy,
severe in the frontal lobes and moderate in the temporal lobes, affecting the
right side more than the left” was noted.
The authors say that both of these patients displayed
Witzelsucht, a German term literally meaning ‘joke addiction’. Several cases
have been reported in the neurological literature, often associated with damage
to the right hemisphere of the brain. Witzelsucht should be distinguished from
‘pathological laughter‘, in which patients start laughing ‘out of the blue’ and
the laughter is incongruent with their “mood and emotional experience.” In
Witzelsucht, the laughter is genuine: patients really do find their own jokes
funny, although they often fail to appreciate those of others.
Courtesy of Doximity
Granadillo ED, Mendez MF. Pathological Joking or Witzelsucht
Revisited. J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci. 2016 Feb 22:appineuropsych15090238.
[Epub ahead of print]
Abstract
Humor, or the perception or elicitation of mirth and
funniness, is distinguishable from laughter and can be differentially disturbed
by neuropsychiatric disease. The authors describe two patients with constant
joking, or Witzelsucht, in the absence of pseudobulbar affect and review the
literature on pathological humor. These patients had involvement of frontal
structures, impaired appreciation of nonsimple humor, and a compulsion for
disinhibited joking. Current neuroscience suggests that impaired humor
integration from right lateral frontal injury and disinhibition from
orbitofrontal damage results in disinhibited humor, preferentially activating
limbic and subcortical reward centers. Additional frontal-subcortical circuit
dysfunction may promote pathological joking as a compulsion.
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