If you find yourself merrily chortling at a gruesome joke about death or laughing all out at the macabre ways Kenny dies in each episode in South Park to very judgy stares, brush it off.
Your dark sense of humour may not earn you a lot of fans but it indicates that you’re pretty smart.
According to a study published in the Cognitive Processing Journal, Ulrike Willinger and his team at the Medical University of Vienna have found a correlation between dark humour and higher intelligence.
Black humour is the kind of humour which finds bleak subjects like death, disease, deformity, handicap or warfare, bitterly amusing. These topics are presented in humorous terms and is a way of expressing the absurdity, insensitivity, paradox and cruelty prevalent in the modern world.
Around 156 participants, all about the average age of 33 were shown a series of dark cartoons from Uli Stein’s The Black Book (a light-hearted afternoon read) and asked to rate them on how amusing they found it. Those who had rated them higher performed better at verbal and non-verbal IQ tests set for all the participants.
It was concluded that understanding a dark joke is a complex information processing task. Not only were people in favour of dark humour found to have an increased information-processing capacity, they also had lower aggression and mood disturbance.
So basically those who think dark humour is twisted and sick, are more prone to aggression and mood swings. Humour is a coping mechanism to deal with trauma and the indifference of the modern world.
Conclusion: It’s cool to find macabre jokes hilarious and no, your soul is not as dark as your sense of humour.