A Hungarian study found that people who dislike dark comedy tended to feel less anxious and negative when exposed to light humor, but more anxious when exposed to dark humor. After watching humorous videos, people most often reported lower levels of both positive and negative emotions. This study Individuality and individual differences.
Humor is the ability to perceive, create, or appreciate funny or absurd situations. It often works by defying expectations in harmless ways, such as surprise, irony, exaggeration, and wordplay. One influential explanation, the “benign violation” theory, suggests that something is funny when it violates norms, but when it feels safe rather than threatening.
Humor also relies on cognitive processes such as pattern recognition, changing perspective, and resolving incongruities. When a person experiences humor, the reward system in the brain is activated, which can lead to laughter. Laughter reduces physiological stress by lowering muscle tone and reducing stress hormones.
Humor also strengthens social bonds, as sharing a laugh shows trust, similarity, and psychological safety. On a psychological level, humor helps people reframe difficult situations and gain emotional distance from problems. This coping function is associated with increased resilience and improved overall mental health. However, not all humor is beneficial. A hostile or self-defeating style of humor can reinforce negative emotions rather than alleviating them.
Study author Julia Basler and her colleagues wanted to investigate how consuming humorous content that matches an individual’s comic style affects anxiety and emotional state. They hypothesized that consuming humorous content that matched one’s comic style preferences would reduce anxiety and experience more positive emotions (and fewer negative emotions).
They categorized humor into four light styles called fun, humor, nonsense, and wit, and four dark styles called irony, sarcasm, satire, and irony. The light humor style is based on charity, interpersonal cooperation, positive emotions, and cognitive abilities. At the heart of the dark style is ridicule and ridicule of others.
“Fun means a very sociable and uplifting joke, teasing. (Well-intentioned) humor is associated with empathy about everyday events and shows acceptance of others and their shortcomings. Nonsense is playful, silly “Wit includes some characteristics of a darker style, but is also considered a lighter style that uses surprising punch lines and wordplay, and connects ideas and thoughts for comical effect,” the study authors explained.
“Cynicism is close to Schadenfreude. It is often hostile, prefers to subjugate its audience, and focuses on the corruption of the world. Cynicism uses ridicule to highlight weaknesses in the world, belittling principles, moral concepts, and norms. Satire, like the previous two, , is offensive, critical, and uses ridicule to compare the real world with the ethical world. Irony is expressed by saying things in a way that a smart enough person would understand, but at the same time would ridicule a fool.
The study participants were 275 adults. Approximately 76% of the participants were Hungarian nationals, and the rest were international students. The average age of the participants was 25 years, and 183 of them were women.
Participants completed assessments of comic style (Comic Style Marker Questionnaire), anxiety (Spielberger’s State-Trait Anxiety Inventory), and affect (Positive and Negative Affect Schedule). After completing these ratings, participants were shown six videos from various comedy cartoon shows and movies. Three of them represent light comic style scenes and three represent dark comic style scenes. Participants completed measures of state anxiety and affect before and after each block of videos. They also reported how much they liked each scene.
The study authors divided participants into four categories based on their cartoon style preferences. “light taste” (people scored higher on the light comedy style and lower on the dark comedy style); “Dark tastes” (those with a high preference for dark comedy styles and a low preference for light comedy styles). “broad engagement” (individuals who scored high on both light and dark cartoon styles);
The results showed that anxiety levels in people with a light preference did not change after watching a light comic style video, but increased significantly after watching dark humor. Dark Preference participants’ anxiety did not change after watching either type of video. Broad Engagement participants experienced decreased anxiety after bright videos, but no change after dark videos. Finally, anxiety among those with low engagement decreased after watching videos with light humor, but increased after watching videos with dark humor.
Looking at participants’ emotional states, those with low engagement, those with dark tastes, and those with broad engagement showed a decrease in both positive and negative emotions after watching the comedy video. However, the low-engagement group and the dark-preference group had more reductions in negative emotions after watching a light humor video than a dark one. For people in the light preference category, positive affect decreased after both types of humor, but negative affect was largely unaffected.
The researchers noted that the overall decrease in positive emotions in all groups, even when viewing humor that they enjoyed, may have been due to the boring nature of the experimental environment rather than the video itself.
“These findings suggest that humor congruence plays an important role in regulating emotional responses, with light humor providing a buffer against anxiety for most participants, while the effects of dark humor vary depending on individual preferences,” the study authors concluded.
This study contributes to scientific understanding of the psychological effects of humor. However, it is important to note that this study did not include any interventions that specifically increased participants’ anxiety or negative emotions before watching the video. Therefore, the scope for video to significantly reduce stress was limited. The results might have been different if the participants had experienced heightened anxiety or stronger negative emotions beforehand.
The paper “Why aren’t you laughing? – Effects of dark and light humor on anxiety and emotional state” was written by Julia Basler, Dorotya Potó, Kata Kumli, Márk Ferincz, Sára Kárpáti, and Norbert Zsidó András.
