https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7663-0699
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ABSTRACT
People find humour in the darkest and most tragic situations. However, there is remarkable interpersonal variability when it comes to setting the so-called limits of humour. We examine how the Dark Tetrad personality traits (DT4; Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism) relate to responses to black humour jokes in online settings. A community sample of 745 adults completed the Short Dark Triad and the Assessment of Sadistic Personality inventories before rating a set of ‘black’ and neutrally humourous jokes in terms of their (a) appreciation (fun/offence), (b) likelihood of sharing, and (c) censoring them on social networks (e.g. Twitter/Facebook). After controlling for common variance, everyday sadism emerged as the strongest DT4 predictor of black humour preferences. This type of dark personality was uniquely associated with higher fun and sharing, and lower offence and censorship of black humour jokes. Machiavellianism was related to negative levels of black humour censorship and offence, whereas the opposite associations were observed for narcissism. Yet, the DT4 only showed rather modest amounts of shared variance regarding responses to black humour jokes, suggesting that interpersonal callousness is insufficient to account for the complexity of black humour interposal variability. We discuss the findings with respect to earlier humour literature.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability
Data and all analyses codes are available at the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/bsvy4/?view_only = f4058a7c8238436da5f8e8dc7381d72e.
Notes
1 Among the 32 eligible black jokes, we prioritised those with a superior image quality and that allowed us to keep the number of jokes about accidents and illnesses well-balanced.
2 Note that we use term ‘predict’ in the technical sense. Since our data are cross-sectional, we cannot draw causal inferences.
3 Men appreciated black humour jokes more positively than women did (high fun and less offence). They also shared these stimuli more often and censored then less than their female counterparts. Moreover, Younger people also appreciated more positively and censored less black humour jokes than older people. Education was unrelated to the responses to black humour. Participants with higher incomes were less likely to engage in censorship-related behaviours when dealing with this type of humour. Political orientation also played a significant role, with a more positive appreciation and less censorship of black humour jokes among those with a left-wing orientation. Note that all the coefficients describing these associations: beta weights, p-values, and raw relative weights can be seen in the ESM.
4 Observed correlation analyses indicated that sharing-related variables (r = .78) on the one hand and censorship-related variables (rs ≥ .81) on the other were strongly interrelated to each other (see Table ESM5). Regressions analyses and RWA also revealed similar results for all these criteria.
5 This strategy allows including specific items/jokes that optimise the measurement of these black humour domains as the same unitary construct.
6 Note that due to our research design, the latent dimension named as sharing was only composed of two indicators.
7 Secondary to our main research purposes, we also observed that being a man and, to a lesser extent, a political left-wing orientation were associated with more favourable attitudes toward black humour. By contrast, age and social class (education/income) were mostly independent from black humour outcomes.