Better comedy through medicine?

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on December 15th, 2008

It happens rarely, but the occasional consumer of comedy will accost one of us comedians after a show (or, super-rarely, during a show!) and take him or her to task for being offensive or… just plain not funny.

We chalk it up to the occasional crank– and occasional cranks lurk in nearly every randomly thrown-together group. But we never thought the person might actually be sick. Might they have Pick’s Disease?

But a study making the cyber-rounds may explain why the odd audience member just doesn’t get it. An article entitled “Sarcasm– a diagnostic tool for dementia” an Australian study of Frontotemporal Dementia (or FTD) says that those with the disease “have trouble reading emotions and are often unable to sense when someone is being sarcastic.”

Even though FTD is the second most common form of dementia in younger people (i.e. under 65) it is often misdiagnosed as a personality disorder or sufferers are dismissed as strange, and often ostracised because FTD can lead to sexual disinhibition, rudeness and a lack of empathy.

Experts estimate as many as 5,000 Australians suffer from the degenerative condition which many do not know they have– there is also the suspicion that FTD may be more common in those over 65 than is currently believed.

According to the UNSW researchers their study could be used to help provide an early diagnosis for the behavioural form of FTD and to help manage the condition and also be particularly useful in determining which patients will deteriorate rapidly. […]

The study helps explains that they behave the way they do because they are not able to pick up the subtleties of communication.

FTD is often very difficult to diagnose because people present with changes in personality and behaviour and Professor Hodges says care givers and relatives often report that people with the disease are generally humourless or without irony and he says comedy has to come into health care.

Emphasis ours.

Wikipedia says the disease was “named after Arnold Pick, a professor of psychiatry from the University of Prague who first discovered and described the disease in 1892 by examining the brain tissue of several deceased patients with histories of dementia.” But we’re going to email the Aussie doctors and ask if they can rename the malady “Heckler’s Disease.”

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