Why do people have a dark sense of humor?

Have you seen this weird meme on the internet?

via Know Your Meme

Apparently this 4-panel comic could be made with such simplistic measures like these examples:

Via Know Your Meme

“Loss” is a part of an iconic webcomic series in 2008 titled “Ctrl+Alt+Del” wherein the woman in the comic named Lilah suffered from a miscarriage.

I’m sure most of us would never think of making fun of a miscarriage as it is a crucial loss (see what I did there?) of a new or unborn life of a child and of course the agony and pain of its relatives especially its mother.

This is not the only meme that extended its way to fame with dark context as there are different examples of it like Logan Paul’s suicide forest vlog memes and Joker’s society memes.

Now, why is this funny?

The fans of the series received the comic’s most unprecedented turn of events in the comic that they had to mock the comic itself.

However, it became a huge hit unexpectedly and spread all throughout the internet allowing it to live for over a decade.

Mockery is a part of our humor and if we put it in the right context, it could be infinitely more hilarious than the puns said by other people.

However, this still doesn’t prove the reasoning on why they approve of such dark humor as the context of the said meme could be said as a “little overboard”.

An old article named "Why is millennial humor so weird?" by Elizabeth Bruenig stated that “Studies show that traditional sources of meaning, such as religion and family formation, are less relevant to the lives of young people than they were to our parents.”.

This could explain on why our generation tends to empathize with such edgy dark humor despite its wicked content.

Alex Borgella, a Ph.D. Candidate in Psychology in Tufts University, shared some insights on why do we laugh at such bad situations or edgy humor.

He stated in an article that there are 4 theories that could prove this phenomenon: Superiority Theory, Relief Theory, Incongruity Theory, and Benign Violations Theory.

I am not going to bore you with long explanations so here’s the short one.

⦁ Superiority Theory means misfortunes of others make us feel superior, hence we laugh

⦁ Relief Theory means we feel reassurance after a certain thing which releases our tensed psyche

⦁ Incongruity Theory means subverting the expectations from the reality

⦁ Benign Violation Theory means we are in a safe space that is away from the violation that is about to happen

Therefore, we have our own fun through the misery of others as long as we're safe.

Whether we like it or not, there is a scientific explanation on why we indulge in such humor and we cannot deny that we agree on the statement above on some level.

However, do not take this the wrong way.

Being dark and edgy does not mean you are a bad person, but rather you have a different sense of humor and tolerance from other people on where they draw their borderline of genius comedy.