Definition of black humour

Black humour is defined as a kind of humour that treats sinister subjects like death, disease, deformity, handicap or warfare with bitter amusement (Mindess et al. 1985; Baldick 2001) and presents such tragic, distressing or morbid topics in humorous terms (Oxford dictionaries 2016). Black humour, often called grotesque, morbid, gallows or sick humour (Mindess et al. 1985; Oxford dictionaries 2016), is used to express the absurdity, insensitivity, paradox and cruelty of the modern world. Characters or situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of normal satire or irony, potentially requiring increased cognitive efforts to get the joke. Furthermore, black humour, often uses devices associated with tragedy, is sometimes equated with tragic farce (Lagasse et al. 2000) and is perceived as morbid, nasty, psychopathic, twisted and often very funny (Maxwell 2003).

Models of humour processing

Humour often uses categories and structures of thought organized in the form of frames which are accessed by particular images, notions or mappings (Lakoff 1987). In the course of humour processing, these categories and structures of thought are often semantically reanalysed and reorganized by mapping elements of one frame into a new frame (Coulson and Kutas 1998). Such a ‘frame-shifting’ process (Coulson 2000) can often be seen as the basis of humour processing as it requires the recruitment and integration of background knowledge about the frames used in a joke. Reading the joke ‘I let my accountant do my taxes because it saves time. Last spring it saved me ten years!’, the first sentence provokes the image of a busy-professional paying an accountant to do his taxes as the reader recalls his knowledge about relationships between business people and their accountants. However, the word ‘years’ in the latter sentence calls forth a reinterpretation of the word ‘time’ as time in prison, evoking a shifting of the initial frame ‘busy-professional’ into the frame ‘crooked-businessman’ (Coulson and Williams 2005). Another cognitive operation that underlies humour processing is called ‘blending’ which requires people to combine cognitive models from different domains into new concepts (Coulson 2001). In such a way, humour is often based on ‘frame blends’ (Hofstadter and Gabora 1989) which require the blurring of two distant scenarios so as to create a humorous hybrid situation composed of aspects of each situation. Such a form of blending can be demonstrated by a black humour cartoon by Stein (1997), used in the current study (see Table 1, cartoon 12). The cartoon shows the suicide of a husband who hanged himself with a green tie and is found by his wife and her friend. Finding her husband dangling from the ceiling, the wife is supposed to have feelings like shock, sadness or desperation. However, the elements of the tragic suicide of the husband are blended with the elements of the stereotypical complaining of a wife about her husband’s taste for clothing (‘And once again the green tie with the blue suit. Come on, what have I been nagging him about for all these years?’). It was shown that these operations underlying humour processing depend on cognitive abilities (Coulson 2001) and that increased cognitive ability is necessary to understand a joke (Coulson and Kutas 1998).

Table 1 Verbal description of the black humour cartoons (Stein 1997) Full size table

Cognitive demands in humour processing

Investigations on the effects of cognitive domains involved in humour comprehension are often based on the ‘incongruity-resolution model’ (Suls 1972) which assumes that humour is processed within a two-stage problem-solving process. In the light of this model, humour processing is dependent on the recall of necessary background knowledge from the long-term memory (Coulson 2000) as well as problem-solving ability (Suls 1972). Humour processing was shown to be dependent on intelligence (Vrticka et al. 2013) as well as on verbal and visual abilities (Shammi and Stuss 1999) as these cognitive abilities potentially influence frame-shifting and cognitive blending. Whilst Feingold and Mazzella (1991) found appreciable associations between verbal measures and humour reasoning, Wierzbicki and Young (1978) found that verbal intelligence was positively related to humour comprehension. In the context of the previously mentioned incongruity-resolution model, Greengross and Miller (2011) showed that humour ability was more strongly associated with verbal intelligence than with abstract reasoning. Therefore, humour processing is assumed to be a complex information-processing task, relying heavily on intellectual as well as other cognitive abilities (e.g. Derks et al. 1997; Greengross and Miller 2011; Shammi and Stuss 1999; Vrticka et al. 2013).

Emotional demands in humour processing

The notion of humour processing involves cognitive as well as emotional aspects (Ruch and Ekman 2001) and is supported by recent fMRI studies (e.g. Vrticka et al. 2013; Wild et al. 2003). In this context, it could be shown that higher intelligence not only influences the cognitive aspects of humour processing but also the affective components (Vrticka et al. 2013).

Considering the role of mood in humour appreciation, Deaner and McConatha (1993) showed that increased depression scores are associated with greater problems in the use of humour to cope with stressful events. Neumann and colleagues (2001) showed that subjective humour response is influenced by pre-existing mood as pre-existing mood increases the intensity of affectively congruent emotions whilst dampening incongruent emotions. According to Ruch and Köhler (1998), trait cheerfulness, seriousness and bad mood are the temperamental basis of humour. Whilst individuals with a high level of trait cheerfulness usually present a low threshold for laughter, individuals with trait bad mood do not seem to be able to be involved in humour or show sad or ill-humoured behaviour in cheerfulness-evoking situations. On the other hand, Ruch and Köhler (1998) as well as Remplein (1956) suggest that trait bad mood might facilitate the appreciation of certain forms of humour as ‘…someone in a bad mood might be prone to negative humour, e.g. enjoy humour of misanthropic quality…’ (Ruch and Köhler 1998, p. 211).

Theories about the relationship between aggression and humour were postulated as early as 1905 as Freud hypothesized that humour allows for a temporarily and relatively safe release of usually repressed sexual and aggressive urges in the form of wits. Therefore, aggressive humour ‘has at its disposal sources of pleasure to which harmless wit has no access’ (Freud 1905, p. 138). In a rating task study, McCauley and colleagues (1983) found a substantial association between humour and aggression as independent groups of subjects judged a set of cartoons. Prerost (1983) showed that individuals in an aggressive mood perceived aggressive humour as funnier than subjects in a non-aggressive mood. Moreover, the arousal levels in individuals in an aggressive mood lead to an increased appreciation of aggressive humour.

Herzog and Bush (1994) investigated the preference for sick jokes in a sample of 302 undergraduate students. They showed that the most preferred jokes were rated lowest in vulgarity and at the same time highest in fit and surprise. In another study, Herzog and Karafa (1998) investigated the preference for sick jokes (categories classified by Herzog and Bush 1994: death, death-baby, general and handicapped) compared to non-sick jokes (categories classified by Mindess et al. 1985: nonsense, social satire, philosophical, sexual hostile, demeaning to men and women, ethnic and scatological jokes—humour that possibly but not necessarily taps serious subjects but not sinister and tragic subjects like sick humour does) in a sample of 241 undergraduate students. Results showed that sick jokes were less preferred than non-sick jokes, but at the same time sense of humour showed a strong positive association with preference for sick jokes. Whilst fit and surprise were positively related to preference, cruelty (‘How vicious or cruel is the emotional tone of the joke towards an individual or group?’) was negatively related to preference. Other studies about sick humour showed that subjects who prefer such humour are more likely to be male (Herzog and Anderson 2000; Herzog and Karafa 1998; Oppliger and Zillmann 1997), more likely to be rebellious (Oppliger and Zillmann 1997) and are more capable to treat sick humour as playful fiction (Mindess et al. 1985).

Aim of the study

Humour processing is a complex information-processing task that is dependent on a number of cognitive as well as emotional demands. The aim of the current study was to identify groups which differ with respect to the processing of black humour as it apparently provides a perfect combination of both cognitive and emotional demands. It was assessed whether these groups show differences with respect to cognitive (verbal and nonverbal intelligence) as well as emotional demands (mood disturbance, aggression).