Posted on 07/19/2023 3:58:04 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A dark sense of humor doesn't make you a bad person—just a smart one
A man walks into a rooftop bar and takes a seat next to another guy. “What are you drinking?” he asks the guy.
“Magic beer,” the guy says.
“Oh, yeah? What’s so magical about it?”
Then the guy shows him: He swigs some beer, dives off the roof, flies around the building, then finally returns to his seat with a triumphant smile.
“Amazing!” the man says. “Lemme try some of that!” The man grabs the beer. He downs it, leaps off the roof—and plummets 15 stories to the ground.
The bartender shakes his head. “You know, you’re a real jerk when you’re drunk, Superman.”
Let’s ignore for a moment whether or not that poor rube survived his fall (if it makes you feel better, let’s say Trampoline Man was waiting for him on the ground). The real question is: Do you find dark jokes like this one funny? Sick? Maybe a little of both? Or do you prefer to stick to short jokes that are a little more wholesome?
What is a dark sense of humor?
If you laughed at that Superman joke, you definitely have a dark sense of humor. But what is dark humor, exactly? Psychologists have defined it as “humor that treats sinister subjects like death, disease, deformity, handicap or warfare with bitter amusement and presents such tragic, distressing or morbid topics in humorous terms.” If your reaction to those kinds of jokes is “that’s terrible, but I laughed,” then you enjoy dark humor. If you find yourself searching “dark humor meaning” to understand why people find the joke funny, or you react negatively to making light of difficult topics, then dark humor probably isn’t for you.
Does a dark sense of humor mean you’re smart?
According to a study published in the journal Cognitive Processing, your reaction to dark humor could indicate your intelligence. In the paper, a team of psychologists concludes that people who appreciate dark humor may have higher IQs, show lower aggression and resist negative feelings more effectively than people who turn up their noses at it. MOR To test this correlation between a dark sense of humor and intellect, researchers had 156 male and female participants read 12 bleak cartoons from The Black Book by German cartoonist Uli Stein. (One of them, which paraphrases a classic joke, shows a mortician reaching deep into a cadaver as a nurse muses, “The autopsy is finished; he is only looking for his wrist watch.”) Participants indicated whether they understood each joke and whether they found it funny, then took some basic IQ tests and answered questionnaires about their mood, aggressive tendencies and educational background.
What did the study on a dark sense of humor find? The results about a dark sense of humor were remarkably consistent: Participants who both comprehended and enjoyed the dark humor jokes showed higher IQs, and reported less aggressive tendencies, than those who did not. Incidentally, the participants who least liked the humor showed the highest levels of aggression and the worst moods of the bunch. The latter point makes sense when you consider the widely studied health benefits of laughter and smiling; if you aren’t able to greet negativity with playful optimism, of course you will feel worse.
But what about the link to intelligence? According to the researchers, processing dark humor jokes takes a bit more mental gymnastics than, say, processing a knock-knock joke—it’s “a complex information-processing task” that requires parsing multiple layers of meaning, while creating a bit of emotional distance from the content so that it registers as benign instead of hostile. That emotional maneuvering is what sets dark humor jokes apart from, say, puns, which literally pit your brain’s right and left hemispheres against each other as you process a single word’s multiple meanings but usually don’t force you out of your emotional comfort zone. Tina Fey sums up the difference pretty well: “If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.”
The takeaway: Pretty much any joke that relies on wordplay will put your brain to work—dark humor jokes just require a bit more emotional control to earn a laugh. Give your brain a spin with these jokes proven to make anyone sound smart, or, if you do want to test your black humor cognizance, consider the following dark riddles from the Reader’s Digest comedy crypt to exercise your hardened funny bone.
“‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I apologize’ mean the same thing. Except at a funeral.” —Demetri Martin
Q: What has four legs and one arm? A: A happy pit bull.
“Cats have nine lives. Makes them ideal for experimentation.” —Jimmy Carr
Q: Why don’t cannibals eat clowns? A: Because they taste funny.
“I have a vest. If I had my arms cut off, it would be a jacket.” —Mitch Hedberg
Q: What did Kermit the frog say at Jim Henson’s funeral? A: Nothing.
“If at first you don’t succeed, then skydiving definitely isn’t for you.” —Steven Wright
Next, here are some jokes research proved to be funny.
Did you hear about the cannibal who ate the Pentecostal missionary? Didn’t taste bad, but he kept throwing up his hands.
Mitch Hedberg: Another funny guy that was gone too soon.
“Nyquil on the rocks. For when you’re feeling sick, but sociable.”
I own a dog with no legs. I call him, ‘Cigarette’ because every night I take him out for a drag.
*BA DUMP DUMP*
Or a Bass in the Bass-O-Matic! :)
I was laughing at the Superman joke before it even ended. Heard that one a long time ago.
One night about 3am I was in the bathroom doing my business and reading an article about practical jokes.
A guy said he saw a dead deer on the road and went home to get his Santa costume and laid next to the deer as the school bus drove by.
I was laughing so hard I was actually crying but trying to stay quiet. I was worried my wife would hear and think I was despondent over a recent job loss.
That qualifies as dark humor.
One of my favorite books is the Helen Keller Joke Book: Around the Block in 80 Days.
I bought a used CPR dummy for a group I volunteer with.
His name is Matt
I have a copy of that book.
I remember that joke.
“I have some blacks in my family tree. They’re still hanging around...”
“Wednesday’s your night in the barrell”
“Why do Scotsmen wear kilts? Sheep can hear a zipper a mile away.”
“I put the “U” in gUlag.” - Stalin
That’s bad. I’ll Len you some taste.
He soon realized she was heading straight towards his seat.
. As fate would have it, she took the seat right beside his.
Eager to strike up a conversation, he blurted out,"Business trip or pleasure?" She turned, smiled and said, "Business.
I'm going to the Annual Nympho- maniacs of America Convention in Boston ."
He swallowed hard.
Here was the most gorgeous woman he had ever seen sitting next to him, and she was going to a meeting of nymphomaniacs.
Struggling to maintain his composure, he calmly asked, "What's your business role at this convention?"
"Lecturer," she responded.
"I use information that I have learned from my personal experiences to debunk some of the popular myths about sexuality."
" Really?" he said.
"And what kind of myths are there?"
" Well," she explained,
"One popular myth is that African-American men are the most well-endowed of all men, when in fact it is the Native American Indian who is most likely to possess that trait.
Another popular myth is that Frenchmen are the best lovers, when actually it is men of Jewish descent who are the best.
I have also discovered that the lover with absolutely the best stamina is the Southern Redneck."
Suddenly the woman became a little uncomfortable and blushed. " I'm sorry," she said, "I shouldn't really be discussing all of this with you. I don't even know your name..."
"Tonto," the man said, " Tonto Goldstein, but my friends call me Bubba."
Irishman with no arms and no legs behind the house?
Cletus is passing by Billy Bob's hay barn one day when, through a gap in the door, he sees Billy Bob doing a slow and sensual striptease in front of an old John Deere tractor.
Buttocks clenched, he performs a slow pirouette, and gently slides off first the right strap of his overalls, followed by the left. He then hunches his shoulders forward and in a classic striptease move, lets his overalls fall down to his hips, revealing a torn and frayed plaid shirt.
Then, grabbing both sides of his shirt, he rips it apart to reveal his stained T-shirt underneath. With a final flourish, he tears the T-shirt from his body, and hurls his baseball cap onto a pile of hay.
Having seen enough, Cletus rushes in and says, "What the world're ya doing, Billy Bob?"
"Good grief, Cletus, ya scared the bejeebers out of me," says an obviously embarrassed Billy Bob ..
"But me 'n the wife been havin trouble lately in the bedroom d'partment, and the therapist suggested I do something sexy to a tractor."
Are Dark Humor jokes about Trump allowed? Funny?
Biden jokes?
Scott jokes?
Haley jokes?
The jokes shown employ the comical device of contrast, which is morality-neutral. From this standpoint, the study did not test affinity for dark humor but for other aspects of humor. By the way, a response to jokes like this is mediated by the lower, more primitive parts of our brain.
The report potentially leads to the false conclusion that preference for dark humor is intelligent, and plenty of readers will, after seeing this, foolishly seek dark humor and dark topics in general.
The analysis of any aspect of morality has nothing to do with humor. It employs the highest areas of our brain and mind, and anyone laughing at “dark jokes” are just as likely to hold the same traditional moral values which contradict the jokes.
John Cleese’s eulogy of Graham Chapman.....language warning :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkxCHybM6Ek
My dad was hiking Europe alone before the war and was in a youth hostel in Germany one night (about 1935 or 36?). He asked some German boy staying there what was this Hitler guy all about. The boy shushed my dad, looked around the place and whispered “we don’t talk about that”.
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