D is for Dementia: the condition we all dread when we think about our approaching old age. But hang on… maybe there’s something you can now do to alter your chances of developing dementia. You can change your sense of humour! Laugh! I nearly did. Oh sorry; wait that was tasteless and rather warped.
University College London have completed a study of 48 patients (yes it’s not many. Further studies are clearly needed to confirm results) revealing that patients with a rare form of dementia, called Frontotemporal dementia changed their sense of humour over the course of their life. A warped, dark and inappropriate sense of humour is a sign, say the researchers of impending dementia. The results have been published in The Journal of Alzheimers’s Disease.
Have you noticed that your loved one is laughing about things that most of us don’t laugh about? One man laughed when his wife scolded her hand. Another laughed when someone lost their job.
My mum used to laugh every time I lost a job; hysterically in fact but she didn’t develop dementia. I used to get kicks pushing my sister into electric fences or stinging nettles. I also made my mum an orange squash when I was about 8 and instead of water I filled the glass with wee! I don’t do that anymore. Not because I’ve grown up but because I can’t get away with it anymore. I’m a mum and I work and I have to be sensible and boring.
But I guess as we get older we become more childlike again because maybe we don’t care so much about upsetting others. It’s a process of letting go. We come full circle. We joked about the size of black peoples’ bottoms for instance when we were young, grew out of that and return to that in old age. Maybe we are more reflective in old age. And also we have to cope with death around us. Our friends are dropping like flies. Please. We need a sense of humour to cope. Attending funerals have become a regular feature of our social life. Laugh… Aunt Betty has just died. It’s the only way to cope because otherwise you might as well spend your life crying.
There are different types of humour the researchers looked at. Monty Python, absurdist humour, slapstick, Mr Bean style humour and satirical humour, like Yes Minister. Dementia patients had moved towards a dark, inappropriate sense of humour. In my debut novel The D Word Clifford, 54 laughs at runners, shouting out ‘don’t bother, you’ll get cancer one day.’ Maybe Clifford will get dementia. Or maybe he just doesn’t care about upsetting people. In The Catholic Woman’s Dying Wish Darius has a completely sick, dark sense of humour. It’s his way of coping with the memories of abuse in childhood at the hands of the family priest. Maybe he is heading on the dementia road too.
Don’t you think though that we have different senses of humour depending on our mood, our age, our life experiences? And above all what we think we can get away with? If I could get away with it I’d say it. That’s why I created vulgar characters in my books like Darius, Clifford and Shayne to vent what I would like to say in a different life. Maybe my characters will all now develop dementia.