When someone cracks lame jokes in a gathering, it’s often considered a sign of camouflaging social awkwardness. It’s also believed that people use jokes as a way to deal with their anxieties and issues. But that’s just not it about a person’s humorous side. Turns out that people who often make lame jokes could be having a medical condition, which leads them to make remarks that make others laugh. The patient, however, might not even understand why people find him or her so funny!
So, if everyone in the room is laughing at your frequent puns, sexual jokes or pointless stories, almost always at an inappropriate time, chances are that you might have a medical condition called Witzelsucht.
Witzelsucht comes from two German words, Witzel and Sucht, where Witzel means ‘to make a joke,’ and Sucht means ‘addiction’. Combined, Witzelsucht means ‘an addiction to making jokes.’
The condition occurs due to damage to the right frontal lobe and messial-orbital regions, the parts of brain that control narrative and less direct forms of communication.
In a nutshell, the main form of humour of people with this condition, is making short jokes and puns as opposed to multi-sentence long jokes and punchlines. It’s seen that a damaged frontal lobe brings about personality changes in people. According to case studies, people who have Witzelsucht have been seen from being practically humourless to becoming the one who appreciates silliness!
What’s noteworthy here is that while Witzelsucht patients often make inappropriate jokes, they themselves exhibit little to no emotional reaction to humour.
A perfect example of this condition is that of a man who’s admitted in a hospital and making everyone laugh with his out of character jokes and puns, but at the same time unable to find humour in it.
It’s a pretty serious condition, which is often a result of serious pain or trauma.
H/T: dose.com
