4 Medical Conditions That Make You Clinically Unfunny

4 Moria

The first known entry into the canon of clinical cringe comes from German doctor Moritz Jastrowitz. In 1888, he described a patient of his — a servant named Panja — as displaying rampant merriment and silliness for no discernable reason. Like, the guy didn’t find a stray Deutsche Mark, or eat a berry, or otherwise experience anything that might put him in a good mood. He just turned into a goofy li’l guy one day, to the extent that his boss was like: “You need to get out of my face and go see a doctor.”

We can deduce two things from the OG unfunny diagnosis. Panja probably wasn’t a cut-up (“moria” is Greek for “stupid and vulgar”), and Jastrowitz probably wasn’t a great doctor (Panja died). His autopsy revealed a tumor in his frontal lobe, which will be a common theme here.

3 Witzelsucht

German neurologist Hermann Oppenheim took a look at the 13 cases of Moria that Jastrowitz studied, and refined the diagnosis. He described a condition characterized by awkwardness, lack of manners and unacceptable physical boundaries. In my day, we called that “adorkable,” but Oppenheim called it “Witzelsucht.”

Witzelsucht delves deeper into the specific crimes against comedy that its victims commit, specifically calling out puns, hypersexual jokes and an inability to detect sarcasm. There are two modern case studies: a 30-year-old theologian who suddenly turned uncharacteristically bawdy and gluttonous, and a 56-year-old man who was admitted to the hospital after a stroke. 

Both of them had been relatively mild-mannered beforehand, but subjected their physicians to an exhausting barrage of puns and innuendos. And, once again, both were found to have had significant damage to their frontal lobes.

2 Foerster’s Syndrome

Sir, a third German brain doctor has hit the listicle.

In 1929, German neurosurgeon Otfrid Foerster described a case of relentless punning he encountered while operating on a brain tumor. As he was fiddling around deep inside a patient’s lizard brain, the guy suddenly transformed into a 21st-century British alt comedian, launching into a stream-of-consciousness tirade of puns and wordplay, all relating to knives and butchery.

Similar to Witzelsucht, people experiencing Foerster’s Syndrome are obsessed with cracking wise, but they’ve short circuited in a way that prevents them from connecting multiple thoughts. They recognize surprise as essential to humor, but they’re all punchline, no set-up. Their brains become a prix fixe menu of puns, slapstick and random outbursts.

The term Foerster’s Syndrome was actually coined by journalist Arthur Koestler, who wrote that those knife jokes were told by “a man tied face down to the operating table with his skull open,” which frankly is how all puns should have to be delivered.

1 Ganser Syndrome

At long last, we leave puns in our wake. But a more odious scourge lies ahead: improv.

Sigbert Ganser was — you’re never going to believe this — a German psychiatrist who, in 1898, described a condition characterized by a sort of performative wrongness. When asked how many legs a horse has, for example, a patient might confidently answer “five.” They understand the question, they clearly know the right answer, but they choose instead to be just a little bit kooky.

Medical professionals are split on whether it’s a dissociative disorder or a factitious disorder — that is, whether patients are ill or straight-up lying. The condition goes by a few other nicknames: “nonsense syndrome,” “balderdash syndrome” and, revealingly, “prison psychosis.”

In fact, it’s most often seen in people awaiting trial, and most often manifests as a random assortment of behaviors that the patient believes to be symptomatic of mental illness. In other words: some people suspect it’s a form of stay-out-of-jail improv.

Patients report amnesia, loss of personal identity and clouding of consciousness. You know who else experiences all that? An improv dork who was absolutely in the zone during Harold Night at the UCB.