A 69-year-old man's urge to be funny grew so relentless that he would wake his wife in the middle of the night, bursting into laughter, just to share jokes he had come up with. At her request, he started writing them down instead. By the time he arrived for a neuropsychiatric evaluation, he brought roughly 50 pages of material, most of it puns or silly jokes with sexual or bathroom themes.
Neurologists Elias D. Granadillo and Mario F. Mendez described the man in a 2016 report in The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, diagnosing Witzelsucht, a rare syndrome whose German name combines the words for joke and addiction. The strangest part lay beneath the nonstop comedy. He could still pick out the punchline of someone else's joke. He just didn't find it funny.
