I should have seen the warning sign back in January, when I felt compelled to squeeze 16 cheesy puns into a 15-inch column about the annual "Big block of Cheese Day" observance at the White House - a celebration that continues to linger in the West Wing since Andrew Jackson shared a 1,400 pound wheel of donated cheddar with 10,000 Washingtonians back in 1836, in what may have been the first government cheese handout.
As it turns out, what I took to be 16 nuggets of extra sharp humor may turn out to have been symptoms of encroaching brain disease.
Since 1929, there's been a word for people who, like me, feel compelled to drop puns into their conversations and scribblings. And wouldn't you know it would be in German, the language of a people not normally associated with wry humor, especially during the dark days in which the diagnosis was named.
Witzelsucht may sound like a word for bad sausage, but it is the German equivalent of "joke addiction." Symptoms include dropping puns left and right, with the emphasis on quantity rather than quality, while often being unable to "get" the humor in the puns and jokes of others. Happily for punsters and especially their spouses, witzelsucht is an extremely rare malady. Daily exposure to a loved one's virtual nonstop barrage of bad puns and punchline-free jokes would have to take a toll on their own mental health.
Witzelsucht was back in the news last week, after a study in a research journal suggested that the disease may be caused by various forms of neurodegeneration.
One subject in the study rattled off bad puns and unfunny jokes, which he alone considered hilarious, throughout the day, and woke his wife numerous times during the night to share newly conceived tidbits of witzelsucht wit. When the wife asked her husband to write down his insights instead of waking her, he presented her the next day with 50 pages of new material from a notebook he kept by the bed. An examination of the research subject's health records showed that he had suffered a pair of strokes about the time the witzelsucht behavior began.
A second subject became a self-styled jokester over a period of three years, eventually reaching the point where he stopped dropping puns or telling jokes only for the time it took to laugh at them. He, also, failed to see the humor in anyone else's attempts at mirth.
While serve up my puns like I serve up my hotdogs - with relish - I don't think I rate a witzelsucht diagnosis just yet. For one thing, I appreciate the humor of the legions of people out there who are funnier than I am. For another, I spend much more time being a curmudgeon than a comic.
And, although approximately half of the world seems to hate puns, they are not innately harmful to health.
According to Jonathan Swift, "punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it," while Oscar Levant considered the pun to be "the lowest form of humor - when you don't think of it first."
Author Victor Hugo was among those expressing the opposing viewpoint, describing puns as "the droppings of soaring wits."
Hugo's take puts me in mind of a five-foot, two-inch tall inmate clearing a fence during a prison break.
It's a little condescending.