The person who laughs at a cartoon showing a grim reaper waiting impatiently in a hospital waiting room probably isn’t heartless. A 2017 study out of Vienna found the opposite: they may be among the most cognitively able people in the room. And the gap between the highest and lowest appreciation groups wasn’t subtle.
That study, led by psychologist Ulrike Willinger at the Medical University of Vienna, set out to measure something researchers had long speculated about but rarely tested directly: whether the ability to appreciate dark humor, often called gallows humor, actually correlates with higher intelligence. The answer, in controlled conditions, was yes. Through the experiment, Willinger’s team found that people who enjoyed jokes about morbid or dark topics had higher levels of verbal and nonverbal intelligence. Participants who appreciated such jokes also tended not to be as aggressive as those with more conventional senses of humor.
The finding cuts against a common assumption: that enjoying morbid comedy signals something cold or disturbed about a person’s personality. The research suggests the reverse may be closer to the truth. People who laugh at the bleakest jokes are often the ones least threatened by dark subject matter, and least likely to act on aggressive impulses.
What Dark Humor Comprehension Actually Demands
Getting a dark joke isn’t passive. Humor processing is a complex information-processing task dependent on cognitive and emotional aspects that influence frame-shifting and conceptual blending – mental operations that underlie how the brain turns discomfort into comedy. Frame-shifting means the brain rapidly switches from one interpretive framework to another, recognizing that a situation first read as grim is actually being presented as absurd. Conceptual blending is the simultaneous merging of two incompatible ideas into a single coherent meaning. Working memory and verbal reasoning carry the load for both operations.
That cognitive demand is part of why the connection between dark humor and intelligence exists in the first place. A joke that plays with death or disaster requires the listener to hold the literal meaning and the comedic twist in mind at the same time, resolve the incongruity between them, and then suppress any instinctive emotional discomfort long enough to find the whole thing funny. Not everyone’s brain handles that sequence smoothly, which is why some people genuinely don’t get the joke rather than simply choosing not to laugh.
How the Willinger Study Was Designed
All in all, 156 adults took part in Willinger’s study: 76 women and 80 men with different educational backgrounds. The average age of the participants was 33. After IQ testing, they were asked to analyze 12 bleak and satirical cartoons by German cartoonist Uli Stein. The cartoons came from The Black Book by Uli Stein, an anthology of dark humor cartoons described on Stein’s website as “abyssal, deep black humour beyond all limits of taste.”
Participants’ verbal intelligence levels were measured using a vocabulary test. Nonverbal IQ scores were also measured, while aggressiveness and mood states were assessed using two questionnaires. Researchers then sorted participants into three groups based on how much they appreciated the cartoons, and compared those groups on all the measured variables.
The first group, which expressed moderate appreciation for dark humor, was found to be of average intelligence and showed moderate levels of aggression. The second group appreciated the jokes the least of the three and had average levels of intelligence and high levels of aggression. The third group, with the highest reported appreciation for the cartoons, had higher levels of intelligence and the lowest levels of aggression of the three groups.
The group least interested in dark humor wasn’t simply neutral – they were the most aggressive of the three, suggesting that an inability to appreciate morbid comedy may reflect an inability to use cognitive reappraisal, the mental trick of reframing a threat as something manageable or even absurd.
The Broader Link Between Humor and Intelligence
Willinger’s study isn’t the only evidence pointing in this direction. Across multiple studies of humor production ability – measured by how well people generate captions for cartoons, complete punchlines, or improvise jokes – performance correlates with general intelligence at r = .29 to .40. The canonical study in this literature, published in the journal Intelligence by Greengross and Miller in 2011, administered IQ tests and humor-production tasks to 400 undergraduates, asking participants to write captions for cartoons that were then rated by independent judges.
Christensen, Silvia, Nusbaum, and Beaty (2018) replicated and extended those findings in a sample of 285 adults using caption-writing tasks for New Yorker-style cartoons, reporting a correlation of r = .37 between general intelligence and humor production after controlling for personality, with crystallized intelligence showing a somewhat larger effect than fluid intelligence. Crystallized intelligence refers to accumulated knowledge and vocabulary rather than raw processing speed.
The research also points to schoolchildren. A 2021 study published in the journal Humor found that intelligence explained 68% of the difference in humor ability, with higher verbal reasoning linked to better humor production. The pattern holds from childhood through adulthood: verbal ability and humor production are consistently intertwined, and dark humor comprehension appears to be one of the more demanding points on that spectrum.
This connects to a well-established psychoanalytic idea. Willinger’s findings support Sigmund Freud’s 1905 theory of humor, which proposes that humor “allows for a temporarily and relatively safe release of usually repressed sexual and aggressive urges in the form of wits.” Freud’s framing implies that dark humor functions as a pressure valve: people with strong cognitive and emotional regulation can channel difficult feelings into laughter rather than aggression. The Willinger data fits that model precisely.
Not All Dark Humor Is the Same
The intelligence connection comes with a distinction that the research makes clear. Cognitively demanding humor may appeal more to individuals with higher cognitive flexibility, while using or endorsing darker comic styles as a habitual personality trait is a separate matter. In other words, appreciating a well-constructed dark joke and routinely making crude, aggressive comments at others’ expense are not the same behavior. The first is a comprehension task. The second is a style choice tied more to personality than cognition.
Sarcasm and cynicism align with lower interpersonal and occupational well-being, whereas irony and satire may, under certain conditions, support adaptive outcomes such as wisdom, engagement, and intellectual openness. The type of dark humor matters, and so does what drives its use. Someone who laughs at abstract absurdity around death or fate occupies different psychological territory from someone who deploys mockery as a social weapon.
There is also a meaningful ethical line. People who score highest on both verbal and nonverbal intelligence tend to appreciate dark humor more, and the connection runs deeper than raw IQ: emotional regulation, cognitive flexibility, and the ability to hold two conflicting ideas at once all appear to be part of the equation. Dark humor aimed at the indifference of fate or the absurdity of mortality is categorically different from humor that targets a specific vulnerable group. The former asks the audience to recognize a universal truth about the human condition. The latter punches down.
Dark Humor as a Coping Tool
The intelligence link doesn’t fully explain why some people gravitate toward dark humor in the first place. Part of the answer appears to be psychological self-protection. A 2025 study published in the International Journal of Interdisciplinary Approaches in Psychology found a significant positive impact of dark humor on emotional resilience and coping mechanisms, suggesting that individuals who engage in dark humor tend to have stronger psychological resilience and employ effective coping strategies.
In high-stress professional settings, the pattern shows up clearly. A 2024 study of paramedics published in the British Paramedic Journal found that dark humor was identified as both a beneficial coping mechanism for resilience and a means of fostering camaraderie. Paramedics regularly face mortality and trauma, and their use of dark humor appears to create psychological distance that allows them to keep functioning under conditions that would overwhelm unguarded emotional responses.
That kind of context-dependent use has also been studied in mental health settings. The most counterintuitive finding in dark humor research isn’t that intelligent people like dark jokes. Emotional regulation predicts appreciation more reliably than aggressiveness does, meaning the person laughing at the bleakest joke in the room is probably calmer and more cognitively flexible than the person who wrote it to be shocking.
You can read more about how personality traits and humor intersect in intelligence and personality traits.
What the Research Doesn’t Settle
There is no strong evidence that humor produces lasting changes in cognitive flexibility beyond a brief mood-boost window. What humor reliably does is signal pre-existing cognitive ability. Laughing at dark jokes doesn’t make someone smarter. The causality runs one way: higher verbal intelligence and emotional regulation make dark humor more accessible, not the other way around.
The research also has structural limits worth acknowledging. Sample sizes in the key studies have been modest. The Willinger study drew on 156 participants at a single institution in Vienna, and findings from a single cultural context may not translate uniformly across populations with different norms around taboo subjects and comedy. Humor appreciation is also shaped by current mood, personal history with the topics being joked about, and the specific framing of a joke, meaning that what a given person finds funny on any given day is only a rough proxy for their stable cognitive profile.
Read More: 9 Myths About Intelligence
What This Means for You
The research doesn’t suggest everyone should develop a blacker sense of humor. What it does suggest is that the reflexive judgment directed at people who laugh at uncomfortable jokes may be misplaced. The Willinger data consistently placed the highest dark humor appreciators at the high end of intelligence scores and the low end of aggression measures. The person uncomfortable with the joke wasn’t calmer or more emotionally controlled – they were often more aggressive.
For anyone who has felt vaguely embarrassed about laughing at something grim, the science offers a reframe. The cognitive work required to appreciate a dark joke – resolving incongruity, holding two emotional registers simultaneously, and suppressing defensive discomfort long enough to find something funny – is real mental effort. Whether in a hospital waiting room, an ambulance crew, or a late-night conversation with a friend who knows how to find the absurdity in difficult things, the capacity to laugh at darkness isn’t callousness. Most of the evidence suggests it’s the opposite.
Disclaimer: This information is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and is for information only. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions about your medical condition and/or current medication. Do not disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking advice or treatment because of something you have read here.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.