The original caption read: "You didn't see this. Turn the page."
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.
I thought frogs had copper in their blood (blue) instead of iron (red)
What do you call a pig with no legs?
A groundhog.
What do you call a hooker with no legs?
A night crawler.
An airplane is flying along with a englishman, a frenchman, a mexican and a texan.
The plane starts having engine troubles and the pilot yells back : throw everything heavy out the door.
The passengers scramble and throw everything out they can.
It helps a little but the plane keeps decending.
The englishman steps up to the door and says: God save the King and jumps out.
The frenchman steps up to the door and says: Vive la france...and jumps out too.still the plane decends
The texan steps up to the door and yells: remember the Alamo and throws the mexican out the door
A bunch of young athletic women in tight outfits prancing around with hobbyhorses. What's not to like? Especially since the most important question you would need to ask ["are you freaky, or what?"] has already been answered.
The single comment is also a keeper.
My favorite punchlines;
“Not half as surprised as the invisible man.”
I would tell you a joke about Jim Jones but the punchline is too long.
What has thousands of legs and can’t walk?
Jerry’s Kids.
How do you make a dead cat meow?
Freeze it and run it through a band-saw.
Meeeooowww
I’ll let myself out now.
A late friend of mine, Soviet Jewish WW2 veteran and protestor of anti-feminism, Avram Shifrin, spent 10 years in Siberia, used to say that the gulags were the most “equal”
places on earth because everyone was there.
The cast of Monty Python appearing with Graham Chapman’s Urn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox9bcx_LZMs
Sick humor.
Hey dfw,
An example of a humor that I like, Limericks!
Clever play on words, rhyming, as in poetry...
Here are two!.
There once was a woman from Hall,
who wore a newspaper dress to a Ball.
The dress caught fire and burned her entire
front page, sporting section and all.
There once were two queers from Khartoum
who argued all night in their room.
They argued all night
as to who had the right
to do what, with which, to whom!
These are clever, use proper English and are risqué to boot!
Cheers,
Bat
The original caption read: "You didn't see this. Turn the page."
Why is it so hard to break-up with a Japanese girl? You have to drop the bomb on her twice before she understands.
4 AM BUMP!
4 AM?
check your clocks.
Jeffrey Dahmer has his parents over for dinner.
“Jeffrey, I don’t like your friends,” his mother said at the dinner table.
“Well then, just eat the vegetables,” Jeffrey replied.
Bwahahahahahaha!
BTTT!!!!
You have no idea the dark jokes we tell ourselves and others in an attempt to stay sane!
There was a young man from Nantucket...
Not saying that I enjoy dark humor.
But most of my jokes end with “What? Too soon?”
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