My defence mechanism is simple: the worse the situation becomes, the darker my sense of humour gets. My doomscrolling sessions during hard times are closely intertwined with meme scrolling, and I find the deepest satisfaction in the videos and pictures that I will under no circumstances like (because Instagram watches you), but will gladly send to friends who operate according to precisely the same philosophy.

Does it mean that I don't care about sensitive topics? Does it mean that I lack empathy for those who suffer and struggle?

Quite the opposite, actually.

In fact, psychology has been quietly observing this behaviour for decades and, to everyone’s mild surprise, has concluded that people laughing at terrible things aren't necessarily terrible people.

Sometimes they are simply coping.

Imagine a bubble. In the middle sits something deeply unpleasant — something that causes pain. It might be war, illness, death, social inequality, or existential dread brought to you by the morning news.

The difficulty is that these things are often much larger than any one individual. You and I can't process them the way we process personal grief. Our emotional systems evolved to deal with manageable threats, not with the entire planet being on fire simultaneously.

Psychologists have long argued that humour helps regulate this imbalance. Research in positive psychology consistently shows that humour can buffer negative emotions, reduce stress, and strengthen social connection. In other words, laughter functions as a kind of emotional pressure valve.

And pressure valves are extremely useful devices.

When confronted with distressing realities, we experience fear, sadness, and — importantly — anger. Anger contains enormous psychological energy. If it remains trapped inside, it tends to leak out in less charming ways.

Laughter gives that energy somewhere to go.

Some scholars even describe humour as a socially acceptable form of releasing aggression. It transforms anger into something collective rather than destructive. Instead of shouting at the universe, we share a joke about it.

Which is admittedly not a perfect solution, but it is considerably better than shouting at strangers in the supermarket.

Dark humour can be defined as comedy that treats taboo, morbid, or distressing subjects with transgressive light-heartedness. In practical terms, this means jokes about the topics that polite society usually prefers to keep in the emotional basement: death, illness, disaster, trauma, and so on.

In a recent qualitative study of university students, researchers found that young adults often use dark humour to talk about difficult realities that otherwise feel impossible to articulate. Through jokes about exams, burnout, mental health, or existential dread, students reported finding a shared sense of solidarity with their peers.

Essentially, if everyone is suffering together, one might as well suffer with decent punchlines.

Participants described dark humour as a kind of psychological pressure valve during stressful periods. Joking about failure or catastrophe helped them temporarily distance themselves from anxiety and regain a sense of control. In psychological terms, humour allows a moment of cognitive reframing — turning a frightening experience into something absurd rather than overwhelming.

This mechanism is consistent with what psychologists call Terror Management Theory. According to this framework, humans are uniquely aware of their own mortality, which creates a background level of existential anxiety. Dark humour can function as a way of confronting frightening realities — illness, death, uncertainty — while keeping them emotionally manageable.

In short: if existence occasionally feels terrifying, humour allows us to laugh at the monster rather than run from it.

Another important function is social bonding. Research across high-stress professions — including emergency workers, hospice staff, and medical trainees — shows that dark humour frequently appears in environments where people are regularly exposed to trauma. Jokes about grim topics create a shared language that allows individuals to process experiences without becoming emotionally overwhelmed.

Or, to put it less academically: if you spend your day dealing with human suffering, gallows humour becomes a surprisingly effective survival strategy.

However, dark humour isn't an emotional miracle cure.

Researchers often describe it as a double-edged coping mechanism. The same joke that helps one person release stress can feel insensitive or painful to another.

Psychologists explain this using the Benign Violation Theory of humour. For something to be funny, it must simultaneously violate a social norm and feel safe enough to laugh at. If the violation is too mild, the joke becomes boring. If it is too severe, it becomes offensive.

Humour lives precisely in that unstable middle ground.

Which explains why the exact same joke can be hilarious at midnight with close friends and deeply inappropriate at a family dinner.

Studies also highlight another risk: dark humour can sometimes create emotional distance rather than connection. When jokes constantly replace honest emotional expression, humour becomes less of a coping strategy and more of a mask.

At that point, the joke stops releasing pressure and begins quietly storing it.

And emotional storage has never been humanity’s strongest skill.

Earlier we said that laughter releases aggression. That detail matters.

If anger is present — frustration with injustice, helplessness, absurdity — humour can transform that energy into something collective and relieving.

But if fear or pain outweigh anger, jokes often fail.

When someone is still deeply hurt or frightened, dark humour may appear dismissive, cruel, or simply exhausting. What sounds like sharp wit to one person may feel like emotional negligence to another.

Psychological studies on student wellbeing confirm this dynamic: while dark humour can strengthen group bonds, it can also create exclusion or distress when someone personally identifies with the subject of the joke.

Context matters more than the punchline.

This is where empathy quietly becomes the most important skill in the room.

If you notice that a friend isn't in the emotional space for jokes, the correct response isn't a clever meme. It is support: kind words, patience, perhaps a hug.

If you personally feel overwhelmed by dark humour online — which is a perfectly reasonable reaction in a modern internet ecosystem powered almost entirely by irony — it may help to step away from social media for a while. Our emotional systems weren't designed to process thousands of jokes about global catastrophe before breakfast.

Most importantly, remember this: the problem is rarely the joke itself.

The problem is the context around it — and the emotional state of the people hearing it.

Dark humour can be a powerful coping tool, a form of solidarity, and occasionally a surprisingly effective painkiller.

But like all powerful tools, it works best when used with care.

And preferably with good timing.