I have been accused of showing a fondness for bad humor: You’d get more flowers if you weren’t so lackadaisical. The more I groan at a joke, the better I feel, so perhaps bad puns cause a dopamine surge? If it surges your dopamine, can you get addicted to bad humor?

Yes, according to researchers. People can become addicted to telling bad jokes. The condition even has a name: witzelsucht, the inability to stop joking, even when it’s clearly inappropriate. Witzelsucht is sometimes the result of brain injury. Researchers in the journal Neuropsychiatry describe the syndrome:

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.

“Impaired humor integration” is what my partner calls my sense of humor. When combined with disinhibition, it results in the compulsion to tell bad jokes at the worst possible moments: family gatherings, funerals, airport security… 

The term witzelsucht, literally “joke addiction,” was coined in 1890 as a description of a man with a right frontal lobe injury who could not contain his sense of humor. Patients are sometimes referred to as silly or displaying “childish excitement.”

A more recent case of witzelsucht comes from the home of chronic comedy, the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, where two doctors from the Department of Neurology, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences describe patients with unbridled humor due to brain damage.

• One patient woke his wife up throughout the night to tell her jokes he had just thought of. She encouraged him to write them down instead of waking her. He brought 50 pages of handwritten jokes with him to a psychiatric evaluation five years later.

• The second case involved a man with a similar fondness for his own bad humor and impulse control issues involving saying the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong people. His joke addiction resulted in job loss and other life problems. Unlike the first patient, who was well aware of his inappropriate joking behavior, the second patient was oblivious to the problem.

The researchers suggest that both left and right frontal lobe damage are involved in pathological joking. Interestingly, while the patients could understand jokes told to them and could identify them as good jokes, they did not find them funny. Only the jokes they told themselves, often terrible jokes, did they find amusing. “Their humor was entirely internally driven.”

Researchers attempting to understand the relationship between humor and mental health have summarized a number of studies showing humor reduces anxiety and stress and boosts the immune system. They can tell us which part of the brain engages when watching or listening to comedians. But they don’t speculate on whether a person can become addicted to humor.

So the question remains, can you get addicted to telling bad jokes, without a head injury, just through repetition? Again, the answer is yes. If telling off-color, stupid, or inappropriate jokes gives you a thrill, and you continue to do it, against your better judgment, despite negative repercussions, it most certainly meets the definition of addiction.

Joking is a form of displacement. It relieves stress by diverting the buildup of tension to humor, sometimes inappropriate humor. Telling bad jokes relieves tension and can become habit-forming. With a unified theory of addiction, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a substance addiction, a behavioral addiction, or a bad pun addiction. According to this theory, they all derive from the same process of stress and displacement.

Written by Steve O’Keefe. First published January 6, 2025.

Sources:

“This Rare Neurological Condition Can Cause an Addiction to Jokes,” Science Alert, January 1, 2025.

“Pathological Joking or Witzelsucht Revisited,” Neuropsychiatry, February 22, 2016.

“Functional Anatomy of Humor: Positive Affect and Chronic Mental Illness,”  Neuropsychiatry, October 1, 2007.

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