Joking about death, disease, deformity, or warfare is a sign of a person's intelligence, a study has found.

Research led by Ulrike Willinger at the Medical University of Vienna and published in the the journal Cognitive Processing, aimed to demonstrate the links between black humour, intelligence and a person's levels of aggression.

The study asked 156 adults to rate 12 black humour cartoons from Das Schwarze Buch [The Black Book] by German cartoonist Uli Stein and researchers assessed their comprehension and reactions to the illustrated jokes.

Participants were half women and half men and were 33-years-old on average, all with a variety of education backgrounds.

They were asked to rate the cartoons considering a range of criteria, including the difficulty to understand the joke, its vulgarity, how surprising its punch line was and how interesting the topic was.

One example is a cartoon which shows a general practitioner explaining results of a medical test to a couple with the woman being pregnant. “To begin with, here is the good news: Your child will always find a parking space,” says the doctor.

The researchers described humour as “a two-stage problem-solving process” and argued that processing a joke is dependent on intelligence.

The results showed that those who enjoyed black humour jokes were more intelligent, had a higher education level and were less aggressive.

On the other hand, those who were least inclined to like the dark cartoons presented the lowest level of intelligence and were more likely to have mood changes and display higher levels of aggression.

Three distinctive groups also emerged from the study.

First were people who did not like black humour and did not understand the jokes very well. They were found to have an average intelligence and an average aggression score.

Second, the group of participants who had an average understanding of sick jokes but appreciated them the least were found to have an average IQ score but the highest marks for negative thoughts and aggression.

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The third group liked and understood black humour cartoons the best and were found to be the most intelligent and least aggressive.

The team said their findings were “surprising” since they contradicted previous studies, which established a relationship between appreciating sick jokes and being prone to aggression.

In 1905, Freud argued that humour allowed for a temporary release of repressed sexual and aggressive urges.

“Whilst a positive association between black humour processing and intelligence can be shown, aggressiveness and bad mood apparently lead to decreased levels of pleasure when dealing with black humour,” the study noted.