Humour is one thing that everyone – irrespective of age, culture, gender – enjoy and always look forward to it. It is much needed in this fast-paced world, where we are too occupied with rate race and have too little time for self-care. Intense research on this subject in the field of experimental psychology revealed that humour offers numerous health benefits! But, only dark humour is linked to intelligence!
A good humour ease anxiety, stress, handle conflicts more effectively, strengthen the relationship with people, spike your energy levels and boost your immunity. Therefore, it has got the respect of fundamental human behaviour.
But, rarely do people know that dark humour is an important mental exercise!
When it comes to dark humour, people often relate it with terms like superiority, vulgarity, and other negative terms. But psychologists defined humour as a Freudian id conflict or a defence mechanism to hide one’s unwanted feelings.
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What exactly is a Dark Humor?
Dark humour is also known as a black comedy, morbid humour or black humour is a style of comedy that involves making a funny sense of subject matters, which are otherwise considered taboo, serious or painful to discuss. For instance:
A man walks into a rooftop bar and sits next to a guy
Man: “What are you drinking?”
Guy: “Magic beer,”
Man: “Oh? What’s so magical about the beer?”
The guy suddenly drinks some beer, dives off the roof, flies around the building, then finally returns to his seat with a triumphant smile.
Man: “Amazing!”. “Lemme try some of that!”
The man drinks some beer, leaps off the roof —and plummets 15 stories to the ground.
Bartender: “You know, you’re a real jerk when you’re drunk, Superman.”
Keeping aside, whether or not that poor man survived his fall, did this joke make you laugh out loud?
People who love dark humour are probably a genius
Shocked!
You read it right.
A study published in the journal Cognitive Processing revealed that enjoying dark humour is associated with intelligence. The study comprised of 156 male and female participants, they were asked to rate black humour cartoons (from The Black Book by German cartoonist Uli Stein) and report whether they found dark humour funny or not. Further, they were subjected to IQ test and were measured for mood disturbances, aggressiveness, intellectual capacities, and the ability to process black humour.
As per the results, people who appreciate, enjoy or support humour related to death, disease, deformity, handicap or warfare or any tragic topics, have higher intelligence quotient. People who like morbid subject presented in a funny way are also found to display less aggressive tendencies and have the ability to resist negative feelings – when compared to people who dislike black humour. The results were found to be consistent and reliable.
Participants who were disgusted with bad humour showed the highest levels of aggression and the worst moods out of all the participants.
In short, people who embrace negativity with a smile can reap all the benefits of laughter. Because, those who can’t welcome negativity with optimism, struggle to accept positivity too.
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How does dark humour make you intelligent?
While good humour is easily understood, processing dark humour takes time. You need to take a deep dive, brainstorm and decode multiple layers of meaning in the content, without compromising on your emotional comfort zone. You will gain laugh only when you have strong emotional control. And that makes you sound smarter!
But, people with average intelligence struggle to appreciate the darker jokes because the cannot quickly overcome the distaste for the inappropriate subject matter.
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.
Related: If Music Gives You Chills You’re an Emotional Genius, Says Studies
Do you want to know your dark humour cognizance? Then grab your smartphone and check out some dark humor.
Let us know if you understood the punchline of dark jokes and laughed out loud.
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