Witzelsucht (pathological joking)

On John McCrarey's blog, after reading yet another of John's awful jokes, I wrote the following comment in response:

...my new pet psychological theory is that, as men get older, they take a perverse pleasure in deliberately being unfunny, thus introducing a new layer of metahumor: laughter provoked by awkwardness. The humor falls flat, and the rest of us are forced to give a pained smile, laugh politely, and cringe as we wait for the next burst of humorless humor. The only question is why men become like this. I see it happening in myself, too. Does the urge spring from some desire to be useful and/or relevant? If so, why does it manifest as something so off-putting (or at least cringeworthy)? More research is needed. Of course, a lot depends on whether the old jokester himself realizes he’s being unfunny. Some obviously don’t (Dunning-Kruger effect), but some old men know exactly what they’re doing, which is why I used the phrase “perverse pleasure.”

Ah—I see there’s a lot of information on the topic.

One of the articles at the link is a 2022 Newsweek piece:

Why Some People Love Telling Bad Jokes, According to Science

Most people will know someone who loves to make others wince with a bad joke. For some individuals, though, having a dodgy sense of humor is a compulsion that can affect their day-to-day lives.

The condition of pathological joking is known as witzelsucht, described as the excessive telling of inappropriate or pointless jokes. The word comes from the German words for joke, 'witz', and addiction, 'sucht'.

The condition was investigated in a 2016 study by California doctors Elias Granadillo and Mario Mendez. They outlined two cases: One of a 69-year-old man, who experienced a personality change, developing a tendency to compulsively make jokes after he experienced a bleed in the brain ten years prior. He also developed characteristics such as a fixation on recycling, and began making "borderline offensive comments."

The patient himself said in an interview—which no doubt was slightly difficult as the patient kept cracking jokes—that he reported feeling happy generally but that his compulsive need to make jokes had become an issue with his wife and would even wake her up in the middle of the night to tell them to her.

The other patient investigated in the study was a 57-year-old man whose behavior had become erratic around three years prior. He had started to tell childish jokes and laugh easily at his own comments and was generally lacking inhibition. He also purchased almost two dozen Hawaiian shirts and at one point went six weeks without bathing.

Otherwise, he had mostly normal results from neurologic examination and an unremarkable medical history. He died over a decade later after deteriorating in cognition and developing parkinsonism; an autopsy also revealed that he had Pick's disease, a form of the behavioral variant of Frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD).

The authors of the 2016 study concluded that the two patients' pathological humor was linked to damage in the bifrontal areas of their brains. One aspect that linked them was that although they would find their own jokes very funny, they did not experience other peoples' jokes as amusing.

The study notes that damage to the right frontal lobe in particular appeared to be "critical" to pathological humor.

I still think my own theory is better. I doubt John has any brain lesions or bleeds or other conditions to explain his love of bad humor and his compulsion to tell awful jokes. I simply think it's the destiny of most of us males to become like John, to revel in the groans and the pained expressions, whether we know we're being lame or not. Cf. my dad.