: Re: What is dark humor exactly? I heard that people who appreciate dark humor are more intelligent on average. I also read the following: Willinger and her team said their findings suggested

@Connie138

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The Dark part of "dark humor" is easy. It just has to be dark, and I think you got that. The question is what is humor. Humor is something that people find funny. As others have stated it is very hard to explain or nail down, but I am going to try.

Humor is an evolutionary behavior that humans have learned to make it easier to change your mind about something. I know this sounds weird but stick with me. Humans find it very hard to be wrong. When someone tells you you are wrong the natural instinct very of ten is to dig in. When a person acts in some way, then realities that they are incorrect they are very likely to just keep going the wrong way to save their ego.

This is where funny comes in. If we think something is one thing, but then we realize it's another we laugh, release endorphins, feel good and change our mind. Like a caveman hearing rustling in the bushes, "is that a tiger?" "No it was a rabbit, hahaha"

So humor, or a joke is something that sets us up to think one way, and then abruptly takes us down a different significant path. The more abrupt the turn, the funnier something is.

Let's take the classic joke "why did the chicken cross the road". Why is it funny? Because the audience thinks that they are going to get a punchline, but they don't. When this turn happens people laugh. Also this is why a joke is not funny a second time. Once we know the turn, we expect it and our mind is not changed.

So now we can come back to dark humor.Dark humor makes this turn using a dark subject. This often involves death, pain or such. These things put people into very ridge mindsets. Because of that it is often easier to make a twist when society has set the lanes much more tightly.

If I ask you "How do you get 100 apples in a box?" and the answer is "with a blender" it's not funny, because we don't really feel ridged about apples. Whatever happens to them does not matter, I did not alter your perception of anything by saying that. There was no perceivable turn. I will now just leave you with the same idea but using something where your thinking is a lot more set in it's lanes.

How do you get 100 dead babies into a box?
With a blender! How do you get them out?
With a bag of chips.

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