The Swamp

In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler reported on the phenomenon of compulsive punning, known as Forster’s syndrome, after the German surgeon who first observed it. When Dr. Forster was removing a tumour on the brain of a patient, he noticed that as he manipulated certain areas of the brain the patient would burst into a manic flight of puns. The sound of one word swiftly echoed in the sound of the next, and all of the words had something to do with knives and butchery. This gruesome humour, Koestler noted, all came ‘from a man tied facedown to the operating table with his skull open.’