A few people develop a compulsive urge to crack jokes | Hacker News Reader

A few people develop a compulsive urge to crack jokes

bbc.com

65 pointsAmorymeltzer41 comments

I make a lot of jokes and incongruous juxtapositions and things like that, I hope not anywhere close to 'disinhibition' mentioned in the paper. But it makes me wonder how much laughing at a joke is appreciation of a witty idea vs how much of it is a social contract where you say something mildly interesting, laugh, and other conversation participants laugh.

It's still a genuine social exchange, but the point is that humor has empathy as a key component, and it helps us bond. If you were to convey the same concept in a tone of anger or disappointment, most listeners won't laugh. So maybe humor and rants are two sides of the same coin: socialized salience.

But like any other social contract, it can be abused. If you frame a sentence in the cadence of a joke or rant, you're expecting the listener to respond. If you rant for a very long time, people stop listening. If you make jokes 24/7, the social activity of joke-telling is no longer a two-way street, and people stop laughing. If you deliver nonsense like a joke, you may get the knee-jerk social laugh, but not the witty-idea laugh (unless nonsense is the witty idea). If it's inappropriate to bond in a situation, and you tell a joke, you might not get a laugh, let alone an acknowledgment.

For various reasons, patients described in the article only have pieces of this whole system, and struggle with the social aspect or the witty-idea aspect.

I would say there's a definite social component. I have some ability to speak Spanish, and work with several Spanish speaking coworkers. Sometimes I completely miss the joke, but laugh anyways, because everyone else is.

I once sat next to a businessman whose only conversation was making joke after joke during an entire dinner. They were not his own, just regular old jokes. He'd built a business worth 300 million euro over thirty years and he literally told me jokes for two and a half hours. By the end I struggled to even smile let alone laugh. He didn't appear to notice.

Perhaps this explains it.

I suspect he believes the jokes are good because people pay attention to him because of the $300M, not because of the jokes but it's hard for him to tell the difference from where he's sitting.

The funny thing is until you said this it never occurred to me for a moment. My impression was much more of someone that couldn't help themselves. More as if he was terrified of even a moment's silence.

I passed this on to a colleague whose jokes are both constant and terrible (though far from the condition described).

As I said to him, I'd be worried about myself ... but thankfully my jokes are always funny.

It's an interesting insight into what sparks 'humour', and how much of it is physical rather than intellectual.

I'm sure your colleague thinks his jokes are "always funny," too.

....you missed it..

Someone I know had this for the earlier part of their life (till about 35). Mostly, it was a defense mechanism, against extreme nervousness, anxiety, and "out-of-placeness."

They're much much better now. But will still let loose when extremely stressed out.

Did your acquaintance have a stroke/cancer? I doubt your friend had "Witzelsucht."

Instead, I think you're describing a socially awkward introvert performing cringeworthy feats. Awkward in the moment, but hilarious in hindsight.

You're right. It may not have been "Witzelsucht." But it makes me wonder if there's a mild form of "Witzelsucht" that's rampant in the population making people do cringeworthy things.

So finally we understand Chandler's condition (Friends).

I think that Reddit is making this a lot worse, at least for the people using it. Pretty much everyone there is constantly trying to make jokes in order to get a few upvotes and as a result even the most serious subreddits have people who feel the need to crack jokes. It is really fucking annoying.

Reddit? It has always been like that! People try to crack jokes to get attention, now attention has a little number next to it (the upvotes/downvotes) but it's the same thing that's always happened ever. Think back in high school there was always a few kids who would ALWAYS crack jokes to be the center of attention, it isn't any different now that we have websites that kind of "promote" this content more than the rest.

Sure it happens elsewhere as well. But Reddit is really amplifying it.

Did you even read the article? Unless you think Reddit is causing severe brain damage, the phenomenon it's discussing is completely unrelated to this (and if it is causing the brain damage described it's hard to understand why anyone would upvote the jokes, since the other part of it is ruining your ability to laugh at other people's jokes).

>Unless you think Reddit is causing severe brain damage

It probably does.

Probably not the very specific kind discussed in the article.

This is why they introduced the [serious] tag, which literally prohibits jokes in the thread. This was a very welcome feature.

Welcome to whom? I'd rather have the wisecracks.

Welcome to the people who want to participate in serious discussions. You still have threads, and whole subreddits for that matter, with jokes. But before this tag, people who wanted a joke-free discussion were unable to do so on Reddit, and had to dig through piles of puns and jokes to get some thoughtful comments. Now we have space for both groups.

Yeah, but I feel that the combination of jokes and serious discussion is better than either one alone.

They could also add a [srsly!?!] tag for when all comments must express outrage

Actually it would make more sense to have tags and filters, so you could prioritize the type of comments you want to see.

I'm too young to have known it but I think slashdot had a system like that?

It still has.

It's only missing the comments for one to filter nowadays.

I totally agree. One of the reasons I like HN: high signal to noise ratio.

HN is also mostly crap

When you're first getting started in tech I think HN seems much more serious than it is.

Once you're a bit more experienced you realize it's a bunch of hipsters talking about simple and insignificant technologies, and completely ignoring everything else as "old".

That being said, I think it's highly entertaining.

> hipsters talking about simple and insignificant technologies

Are you telling me that a new CSS framework that will save you two lines in your CSS files is insignificant? Or a new <insert the current language that is hip>-style language in <insert a number between 1 and 100> lines of JS!

Surely these are the greatest inventions of our time.

Right. Meanwhile forward-looking tech like gaze detection, word vectors, LPWAN, FPGAs, and so on, are lucky to get a couple posts a month.

I have been active in high tech for many moons and like to look at this place as just another alternative feed for a old man ;) I would much rather HN than other sources, but my time is limited like many. So I just hop on occassionally and learn (or teach) something new. Once in a while a post resonates with me, but when it doesn't that doesn't mean it's just noise. It can mean I have much to learn.

Why don't you post some?

Ain't nobody got time for that.

Since you have time to make this place worse by posting snarky comments about how beneath you it is, you should also have time to make it better.

> HN: high signal to noise ratio

The signal on HN has started to decline tho. Things used to be better. It's kind of inevitable for online communities tho.

I haven't been on for that long, but I am starting to see examples of what you mean. I tend to weed out what doesn't apply to me which I think many do.

At least they aren't developing a compulsive urge to crack farts...

You may want to talk to a neurologist.

Is "crack" the verb usually used here? Seems tenuous.

I was hesitant, but pulled the finger, so to speak.

I have the compulsive urge to crack nuts.

Only when trying to eat them, mind you...

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