I did that when really young. I’d sometimes just think of a joke and laugh so hard I’d have trouble breathing. When I was 11 or so I obsessively read cracked.com and sites like it, and I thought it was the best thing in the world. I also watched comedians on Youtube a lot. I laughed to almost every sentence I read or heard.

I like to think my sense of humor is more refined now, but I’ve noticed when interacting with my girlfriend that I have a constant compulsion to make jokes and use humor, especially when she’s upset, and this is pretty difficult to consciously control — e.g. if she asks me to be serious, it feels very difficult to prevent myself from making a cheap joke (I’m not defending this behavior, just explaining it). Also, the more comofortable I feel with someone, the more impulse I have to push their buttons, so to speak: that is, I don’t mean to irritate them, but to use absurd humor that subverts expectations, because I want to see them weirded out — the impression and shudder people give when their sense of normalcy and reality is challenged. I get an enormous kick out of it.

I once, without really thinking of it, convinced my girlfriend that jackalopes were a real animal, because it made me endlessly amused to see her rewriting her view of reality to accomodate jackalopes. But it was an asshole thing to do, so I felt bad and apologized a couple days later.