The psychological reason why dark humor isn’t for everyone

A study in Hungary found that watching light humor tended to reduce anxiety and negative emotions, while dark humor tended to increase anxiety in people not fond of dark comedy. After watching humorous videos, people most often reported lower levels of both positive and negative affect. The research was published in Personality and Individual Differences.

Humor is the ability to perceive, create, or appreciate situations that are amusing or absurd. It often works by violating expectations in a harmless way, such as through surprise, irony, exaggeration, or wordplay. One influential explanation, the “benign violation” theory, suggests that something is funny when it breaks a norm but in a way that feels safe rather than threatening.

Humor also relies on cognitive processes such as pattern recognition, perspective shifting, and resolving incongruity. When people experience humor, it activates reward systems in the brain and may trigger laughter. Laughter can reduce physiological stress by lowering muscle tension and decreasing stress hormones.

Humor also strengthens social bonds, because sharing laughter signals trust, similarity, and emotional safety. On a psychological level, humor can help people reframe difficult situations and gain emotional distance from problems. This coping function is associated with greater resilience and better overall mental well-being. However, not all humor is beneficial, as hostile or self-defeating humor styles can reinforce negative emotions rather than relieve them.

Study author Julia Basler and her colleagues wanted to investigate how consuming humor content congruent with an individual’s comic style impacts anxiety and affective states. They hypothesized that anxiety would be lower and that a person would experience more positive emotions (and fewer negative emotions) when consuming humor content that matches their own comic style preferences.

They divided humor into four lighter styles called fun, humor, nonsense, and wit, and four darker styles called sarcasm, cynicism, satire, and irony. The lighter humor styles are based on benevolence, interpersonal cooperation, positive emotions, and cognitive capabilities. The center of the darker styles is the mockery and ridicule of others.

“Fun means jesting, teasing, in a very social and uplifting way. [Benevolent] Humor is related to sympathy regarding everyday happenings and shows acceptance of others and their shortcomings. Nonsense is playful, ridiculous, and absurd. Wit – while containing some characteristics of darker styles – is also considered a light style, using surprising punchlines, wordplays, and connects ideas or thoughts for comical effect,” the study authors explained.

“Sarcasm is close to Schadenfreude: often hostile, prefers to subordinate its audience and focuses on the corruption of the world. Cynicism uses ridicule to highlight the world’s weaknesses, and devalues principles, moral concepts, and norms. Satire, like the previous two, detects weaknesses and is aggressive, being critical and using ridicule to compare the real world to an ethical one. Irony is expressed by saying things in a different way than they are meant, assuming that those smart enough will understand, mocking the stupid at the same time.”

The study participants were 275 adults. About 76% of them were of Hungarian nationality, while the remaining participants were international students. The participants’ average age was 25 years, and 183 of them were women.

Participants completed assessments of comic style (the Comic Style Markers questionnaire), anxiety (the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory), and affect (the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule). After completing these assessments, participants were shown six videos from various comedy cartoon shows and movies. Three of those represented lighter comic style scenes, and three represented darker ones. Participants completed measures of state anxiety and affect before and after each block of videos. They also reported how much they liked each of the scenes.

The study authors grouped participants into four categories based on their comic style preferences: “Low Engagement” (people who reported low preference for both lighter and darker comic styles); “Light Preference” (people scoring high on lighter comedy styles and low on darker); “Dark Preference” (those with a high preference for dark comedy styles and a low preference for light comedy styles); and “Broad Engagement” (individuals scoring high on both light and dark comic styles).

The results showed that the anxiety levels of Light Preference individuals did not change after watching light comic style videos, but significantly increased after watching dark humor. The anxiety of Dark Preference participants did not change after viewing either type of video. Broad Engagement participants showed a decrease in anxiety after light videos, but no change after dark ones. Finally, Low Engagement individuals’ anxiety decreased after watching light humor videos, but increased after watching dark humor videos.

Looking at participants’ emotional states, Low Engagement, Dark Preference, and Broad Engagement individuals experienced reductions in both positive and negative affect after watching the comedy videos. However, for the Low Engagement and Dark Preference groups, negative emotions decreased more after watching the light humor videos than the dark ones. For individuals in the Light Preference category, positive affect dropped after both types of humor, but their negative emotions remained largely unaffected.

The researchers noted that the general drop in positive affect across all groups—even when watching humor they enjoyed—might be due to the tedious nature of the experimental setting rather than the videos themselves.

“These findings suggest that humor congruence plays a critical role in regulating emotional responses, with light humor providing a buffer against anxiety for most participants, while dark humor’s impact varies depending on individual preferences,” the study authors concluded.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the psychological effects of humor. However, it should be noted that the study did not utilize any intervention that would make participants’ anxiety or negative emotions particularly high before watching the videos; therefore, the room for the videos to cause a significant reduction in stress was limited. If participants were in an increased state of anxiety or experiencing more intense negative emotions beforehand, the results might have been different.

The paper, “Why aren’t you laughing? – The effect of dark and light humor on anxiety and affective state,” was authored by Julia Basler, Dorottya Potó, Kata Kumli, Márk Ferincz, Sára Kárpáti, and András Norbert Zsidó.