You've probably seen the meme. It’s usually a grainy image of a skeleton or a deeply cynical comic strip with the caption: dark humor is like food not everyone gets it. It's biting. It’s mean. It’s also statistically likely to be true. Comedy is subjective, sure, but gallows humor operates on a completely different frequency than your standard observational bit about airline peanuts.
Most people think liking "edgy" jokes just means you’re a jerk. Or maybe you've got some deep-seated trauma you haven't processed. While that might be true for some, the reality of why some people laugh at the "unlaughable" is actually rooted in cognitive processing speeds and emotional regulation. It isn't just about being "edgy." It's about how your brain handles a crisis.
The Cognitive Load of a Dark Joke
To understand why dark humor is like food not everyone gets it, you have to look at what the brain does when it hears a joke about, say, a funeral or a terminal illness. In a 2017 study published in the journal Cognitive Processing, researchers at the Medical University of Vienna found that people who enjoy dark humor actually tended to score higher in both verbal and non-verbal intelligence.
Why? Because dark humor is complex.
When you hear a "normal" joke, your brain looks for a subversion of expectations. But with dark humor, there’s an extra layer of "emotional friction." You have to recognize the horror of the situation, distance yourself from it almost instantly, and then find the linguistic cleverness or the irony within it. If the emotional horror is too loud, the "funny" part never reaches the brain. It gets blocked by a wall of "this is too sad" or "this is wrong."
The researchers, led by Ulrike Willinger, noted that subjects with high dark humor preference also showed lower levels of aggression and better mood stability. It turns out that if you can laugh at the abyss, you're probably less likely to want to punch a wall.
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Not Everyone Gets It (Literally)
The "food" analogy isn't just a snarky comment on global inequality—though that is the double meaning that makes the joke work. It’s also about accessibility. Some people simply lack the "emotional detachment" required to find humor in the macabre.
I remember talking to a paramedic who told me that after a particularly gruesome multi-car pileup, he and his partner went to a diner and joked about the way a victim’s shoes had flown off. To an outsider, that sounds monstrous. Psychopath territory. But for them, it was a survival mechanism. This is what researchers call "Benign Violation Theory."
According to Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren from the University of Colorado Boulder, a joke works when something feels like a threat or a "violation" (moral, social, or physical) but is simultaneously "benign." For a nurse or a soldier, death is a daily violation. Making it benign through a joke is the only way to keep showing up to work the next morning.
If you aren't in that environment, the violation remains a violation. It never becomes benign. Thus, you don't "get" the food.
The Social Cost of the "Wrong" Laugh
We’ve all been there. You’re at a dinner party. Someone mentions a minor tragedy, and you make a quip that you think is brilliant. The room goes silent. You can hear the hum of the refrigerator. You realize you’ve just outed yourself as the "dark humor person."
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Society has a complicated relationship with the macabre. We love true crime podcasts and gritty dramas, but the moment you add a punchline to real-world suffering, you’ve crossed an invisible line for many.
- Context is everything. A joke told in an ICU breakroom is a lifeline. That same joke told at a PTA meeting is a social suicide note.
- The "Punching Up" Rule. This is where most people fail at dark humor. Effective dark humor usually targets the absurdity of the situation or the person in power. When it targets the victim, it stops being dark humor and just becomes bullying. That's a distinction a lot of "edgelords" on the internet fail to grasp.
Honestly, the reason dark humor is like food not everyone gets it resonates so much is that it acknowledges the exclusivity of the club. It's a "shibboleth"—a way of identifying who thinks like you do.
Is Your Brain Wired for the Dark Stuff?
There’s a biological component to this too. Some people have a higher "disgust sensitivity." If you’re the kind of person who can’t watch a horror movie because you feel the physical sensation of the gore, you're probably not going to enjoy jokes about morgues. Your amygdala is doing its job too well.
People who enjoy dark humor often have a higher "Need for Cognition." They like puzzles. They like the mental gymnastics required to flip a tragedy into a comedy. It’s a form of play.
But let’s be real. Sometimes it’s just about timing.
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History is full of this. Abraham Lincoln was known for his "inappropriate" storytelling during the darkest days of the Civil War. His cabinet was often horrified. He once said, "If I did not laugh, I should die." He wasn't being flip; he was being honest.
Why We Need the Jokes Nobody Likes
If we can't joke about the scary stuff, the scary stuff wins. That sounds like a cliché, but it’s the backbone of satire. From Dr. Strangelove making light of nuclear annihilation to modern Twitter users joking about the housing market's collapse, dark humor allows us to discuss things that are otherwise too heavy to carry.
It's a pressure valve.
If you’re someone who "gets the food," you probably find that you're the person your friends call when things actually go wrong. Because you’ve already spent time mentally rehearsing the worst-case scenarios and finding the absurdity in them, you’re less likely to freeze when the real-world "violation" happens.
How to Navigate Your Dark Sense of Humor
If you've realized your sense of humor is a bit darker than the average person's, you don't need to "fix" it, but you do need to manage it.
- Read the Room (Seriously): Check for "proximal" trauma. If someone just lost a parent, that is not the time for your best orphan joke. Distance—both in time and physical space—is what makes a violation benign.
- Analyze the Target: Before you speak, ask if the joke is laughing at the pain or the absurdity of the pain. If it's the former, keep it in your head.
- Find Your Tribe: Don't waste your best dark material on people who value "wholesome" content. It won't land, and you'll just end up feeling like an outcast.
- Audit Your Intent: Are you joking to cope, or are you joking to shock? Shock humor has a very short shelf life and usually lacks the "intelligence" that makes dark humor actually work.
Embrace the fact that your brain processes the world a little differently. Not everyone has to eat at your table. The fact that dark humor is like food not everyone gets it is exactly what makes it a powerful tool for those who do. It's a private language for surviving a public world that often feels like it's falling apart.
Keep your jokes sharp, but keep your empathy sharper. The best dark humorists aren't the ones who don't care about the world—they're usually the ones who care the most and need a way to process the weight of it.