I recently wrote about humor in autism. What becomes particularly fascinating is seeing how a manic episode can transform the sense of humor of people with bipolar disorder, including those who are autistic. Mania can profoundly change behavior, including the way someone laughs and what they find funny. For some people, it brings intense euphoria, disinhibition, and racing thoughts, completely altering their perception of what is amusing. The relationship between mania and humor can therefore become especially striking.
When I’m manic, it’s like my brain turns into a comedy club. I generate more laughter in a few minutes—often just by myself—than everyone else around me combined over the course of an entire evening. More than once, people have told me, “I’ve never seen you laugh this much.” Everything becomes an excuse to laugh: puns, the sound of certain words, absurd associations my mind invents around what I hear, my own inner worlds, and sometimes even the sentences coming out of my own mouth.
I remember being in a bar one evening in April when a friend noticed I was manic and pointed it out. I almost burst into tears—not out of sadness, but out of joy—because I had been desperately trying to explain what was happening inside my head, and for the first time, someone seemed to recognize it.
Trying to explain mania to a Muggle is a challenge. Even using the word Muggle can make me laugh when I’m in that state. Every invention, every made-up word, every neologism becomes a source of amusement. Sometimes someone else makes a pun that nobody notices except me… and I end up laughing on my own.
In February 2025, I watched the entirety of The Big Bang Theory in a single week. I laughed until I cried dozens of times per episode. So, naturally, I did the math:
- Episodes: 279
- Average runtime: 22 minutes
- Total viewing time: 6,138 minutes
- Assuming I laughed about three times per minute…
- Estimated total laughs: 6,138 × 3 = 18,414
That’s a lot of laughter. And I couldn’t keep it to myself—I constantly filmed my TV screen and sent clips to friends because I wanted to share every moment that made me laugh.
Why Everything Becomes Funny During a Manic Episode
This is where the difference lies: I can enjoy myself on my own, watch comedy sketches, but I rarely feel the need to share my laughter with other people. It has a very personal quality… until I experience a manic episode. Mania amplifies my desire to socialize, which can be particularly striking when you’re also autistic.
A manic episode makes me want to share EVERYTHING with EVERYONE. It’s no longer just about talking with the people closest to me; suddenly I want to start conversations with almost everyone, even people I would normally barely speak to. When I’m manic, I want to share my euphoria. I want to share my laughter. I want everyone to feel my happiness and share it with me.
Losing My Filter and Going on Endless Tangents
Sometimes, it spills over. I can become so immersed in a personal joke that it starts weighing down the conversation. And by conversation, I really mean the monologue I pour onto whoever happens to be listening, carried along by the flow of my thoughts. Normally, I keep most of these funny thoughts to myself. Every now and then, I’ll share one or two, but they remain isolated moments.
When I’m manic, however, I’m less concerned about the people around me than about the overwhelming urge to say everything that’s going through my mind. All the filters I normally rely on simply disappear.
And sometimes, it goes too far. I’ve actually been told to stop talking because what had started out funny had long since lost its charm and was becoming exhausting. Ironically, that’s exactly the kind of thing that makes me want to keep going even more: during mania, any attempt to slow me down can feel like a restriction.
Examples speak louder than explanations. Here are two examples that initially annoyed the people around us—except for my best friend, who joined in—and eventually spread to some of the others. Both happened during a trip to Cambodia in 2025, which I wrote about in a series of articles.
“Boom Boom” at the End of Every Sentence
“Boom boom” is the Khmer equivalent of the Simlish expression for “woohoo” in The Sims. I have absolutely no idea how the joke started. I just remember finding the expression funny because of the way it sounded. One evening by the pool at our first hotel was enough for “boom boom” to become a substitute for almost every word in the English language whenever I was talking to my best friend.
“Boom boom” as punctuation, verb, object. The idea was simply to communicate while using it in every possible way (with no intended double meaning).
After a few days, the expression had completely lost its original meaning. It had become universal punctuation.
And when I’m manic, a running joke like this—no matter how childish or ridiculous—can stay in my head for a very long time. So you can probably imagine that I kept it going throughout the entire trip, even though my best friend was the only one actively playing along.
The Children’s Song
This one is darker—or rather, more inappropriate. Looking back, I think the joke was genuinely in poor taste. At the time, however, my manic brain saw absolutely nothing wrong with it.
On two different occasions, without saying a word to each other, my best friend and I had exactly the same reference pop into our heads while visiting the temples of Angkor. A little girl was trying to sell photo albums, repeating the same sentence over and over despite our repeated refusals. The peculiar thing was that she seemed to sing her sales pitch on a loop.
For those unfamiliar with the reference, it’s from an episode of the extremely popular French comedy TV show Bref., in which several homeless people suddenly start singing their usual lines to the same melody in the subway (episode 41, Bref. J’ai pris le métro.). We both thought of that scene independently and immediately applied it to the little girl.
We ended up singing her sales pitch for hours, to the point where it provoked as many suppressed laughs as it did annoyance (because, let’s be honest, it was still a pretty questionable joke). And between the two of us, I was by far the worst offender.
I simply couldn’t stop.
An awkward silence → the song.
A sentence with a similar melody → the song.
No reason at all → the song.
In short (unlike the format of the TV series), it went on for a very long time.
These two examples perfectly illustrate how things can spiral out of control. In both cases, someone else was encouraging the joke, but that isn’t always true. Even then, I was the one who took it the furthest. My filters had disappeared—and so had my limits.
A Word About These Usual Slips
The main issue is that I occasionally found myself singing the joke in front of an amazing Khmer driver who was giving us a guided tour of the temples. Looking back, I realize he could easily have made the connection and found the joke offensive (and he would have been right). Knowing that Cambodia is the country where I hope to live one day makes me feel a little guilty about it.
Mania doesn’t create this sense of humor—it amplifies it.
It speeds up ideas, associations, laughter, and the urge to share.
Until a private joke turns into something that spills over onto everyone else.
And the most unsettling part is that, in the moment, all of it feels perfectly natural.
And at the time, it isn’t necessarily obvious to anyone that something is wrong.
This amplification of humor is just one of the many ways a manic episode can transform a person. The same mechanisms also influence sociability, creativity, impulsive spending, and even sleep. I’ll explore those topics in future articles.
