When I was in driver’s ed class as a teenager, the girls were told that when they have a new boyfriend, and they want to know what he is really like, they should go into the car with him and see how he drives. The idea was that how someone drives says something about his/her true nature. We can learn about someone’s true nature by seeing how he/she interacts with other drivers on the road, how he/she reacts when he/she is cut off by another driver, how aggressively he/she drives, etc. I postulate that the same concept applies to someone’s sense of humor.
Below are aspects of someone’s sense of humor that can offer a glimpse into his/her true character:
- What kinds of things does he/she laugh at or find to be funny?
- What kinds of jokes does he/she make?
- How does he/she react when the other person does not like the joke?
What does the person find to be funny?
I cannot think of that many things that a good person would find to be funny and that a bad person would not find to be funny; but I can think of lots of things that bad people may find to be funny and that good people would not find to be funny. A bad person may laugh at someone getting hurt. A bad person may laugh at someone as a form of ridicule. Sometimes a bad person likes to laugh when two people are fighting. A man may chuckle when he sees two women fighting, muttering to himself about how vicious those women be can to each other. Sometimes bad people are laughing not because they find anything to be funny, but rather because they are insecure, and they want to deflect the attention of other people off of themselves and onto someone else.
Sometimes bad people take such great pleasure in someone being in a state of distress that they may intentionally drive the other person into a state of distress just to entertain themselves. While we should acknowledge that this is wrong, bad people like to fool us into thinking that they are just “teasing” or committing an innocent prank. For example, a person may make a certain noise that he/she knows makes another person upset, just so that he/she can get a laugh out of seeing the other person in a state of distress. A person may also make an insulting comment, and present it as a joke, just so he/she can press the other person’s buttons and watch the other person give off an angry look. That angry look is amusing to a bad person, but not amusing to a good person who does not take pleasure in making others angry or distressed.
Laughing can be a form of mockery and it can convey disrespect in certain contexts. For example, a person may laugh when someone is presenting his/her opinion about something, even though it is obvious that the other person is not joking and wants to be taken seriously. Such behavior is disrespectful, and gives across the message that the other person’s opinion is laughable. Would you like it if you were speaking your mind about something that is important to you, and then suddenly hear the other person just laugh as if you were telling a joke? This has happened to me a few times. It is, in my opinion, mean and thoughtless.
We also can learn about somebody from what he/she does not find to be funny. Let us say that somebody is the only one in the room not laughing at a scene where a person or animal is getting hurt. This scenario would indicate that the person likely possesses moral integrity, and does not go along with the crowd when the crowd is doing something that is wrong.
What kinds of jokes does the person make?
When bad people make jokes, they often place another person as the target of the joke. In other words, the entertainment is at someone’s expense. At the same time, the one who is the target of the joke is expected to just shrug his shoulders and go along with it for the sake of being a good sport. If he retaliates, then he may be called a spoil-sport.
Sometimes evildoers try to justify their mean jokes by claiming that everyone jokes like this, so we should all just get used to it. They want us to accept their mean jokes as the norm even though there are plenty of people who do not place another human being as the target of their jokes.
Many of you have probably watched The Office TV series, and remember the many episodes where Jim and Pam played pranks on Dwight. I admit, I did find many of these pranks amusing to watch, but the truth is that what Jim and Pam were doing to Dwight qualifies as harassment. When a person continues to behave in a certain way towards another person even though he/she knows that the behavior is unwelcome, the behavior becomes harassment. Jim and Pam know that Dwight does not like their pranks, but they continue playing pranks on Dwight anyway. They are using Dwight as their personal source of office entertainment, at Dwight’s expense, and without any compensation to Dwight for the trouble they cause him. Now I admit that Dwight is not exactly the nicest person either, and he did get vicious when he sought revenge against Jim and Pam later in the TV series, but Jim and Pam’s pranks are still wrong.
So does this mean that Jim and Pam are bad people? While the TV series presents Jim and Pam as being nice and likeable people who have a blossoming romance, upon closer inspection we see that they are not always nice. Numerous articles describe Jim as a bully, analogous to the good-looking jock who picks on the nerdy outcast, which is analogous to Dwight. Other viewers have noted Jim’s bad treatment of women, and his superiority complex. Pam, on the other hand, is described by some as being passive aggressive.
When good people tell jokes, their aim is most often to bring laughter and joy to others. In the 1998 film Patch Adams, Dr. Hunter “Patch” Adams specializes in making patients laugh. Keep in mind that many of these patients have quite serious diseases such as cancer. When patients in the hospital are prone to feeling glum with their serious diseases, Dr. Adams cheers them up and makes them laugh.
A bad person would not want to do what Dr. “Patch” Adams does. A bad person may say he does not want to use his sense of humor to cheer up seriously ill people because he finds being around seriously ill people to be depressing. He would rather be around people who are already happy and/or content so that he can suck the happiness out of them by “pushing their buttons”, and have that be the joke.
While good people often use humor to bring joy to others, bad people, in contrast, often use humor to entertain themselves, and maybe also to impress their friends. Unfortunately, the jokes of a bad person are often at the expense of someone else.
How does the person react when the other person does not like his/her joke?
In general, bad people do not react graciously when the other person does not like the joke. To the bad person, the other person who does not like the joke is always the problem. Nothing is ever wrong with the joke.
Bad people often like to judge other people who do not like their jokes. If you express disapproval of a joke that a bad person makes, the bad person may judge you as being excessively serious, no fun or perhaps one of those “practical” people, while the bad person considers him/herself to be the fun and goofy one. To justify him/herself, the bad person may try to place you into a special category of people who are serious and who don’t know how to have fun. He/she may tell him/herself and others that you are a grouch and never seem to laugh or smile. Meanwhile, the bad person most likely does not want to face the reality that nobody in his/her right mind would be happy in his/her presence.
Sometimes if you try to explain to the bad person how inappropriate the joke is, the bad person may say “ouch!” as if you said something really hurtful — and certainly we don’t want to be hurtful! Here, the bad person is trying to put you on a guilt trip in order to manipulate you into tolerating his bad behavior. The bad person may even tell you that his jokes are a big part of his personality, and that by not being allowed to tell jokes, he cannot be himself.
So how would a good person react if the other person does not like his/her joke? The good person may get a little embarrassed, or may apologize. It can be awkward when the other person does not like the joke, but it is no excuse to act as if the other person is the problem. The other person has the right to decide for him/herself what he/she finds to be funny and what he/she finds to not be funny. We have no right to tell someone what is funny and what is not, and good people know that.
Laughter as a form of ridicule
When we think of laughter as a form of ridicule, we may think of the kid that gets made fun of at school. We may think of a group of bullies laughing at the kid that they are terrorizing. What we may not think of is laughter as a subtle form of ridicule from one adult to another in a seemingly friendly conversation.
A wicked person’s laughter can occur in regular everyday conversation as a way of conveying disrespect. For example, you may be speaking your mind on something that is important to you. Just when you thought you made a great point on something, the other person just laughs. It is obvious that you were not making a joke. Instead, you feel disrespected and mocked. Yet the other person tells you to just chill out, and that laughing is just a part of every day casual conversation.
While laughter is a normal component of everyday conversation, what is not a normal component of conversation is putting people down and making fun of people for the sake of entertaining oneself and for the sake of feeling better about oneself. Yet, as if often the case, the evildoer just wants the other person to believe that he/she is just being too sensitive and needs to lighten up.
Joking too excessively can make someone unpleasant to be around
I have met a few people whose sense of humor is so annoying that they actually are more pleasant to be around when they are in a bad mood! It is sad, but true. The reason I did not like their sense of humor was that they would smother me with one joke after the other, and I did not find the jokes to be that funny. Yet they seem to be oblivious to the fact that nobody laughs when they tell this stream of jokes. They are obviously entertaining themselves, but their captive audience gets a obnoxious stream of silliness. The few people I knew who behaved this way were not very good people.
I think it is easy to say that a bad sense of humor is worse than no sense of humor at all. In my opinion, the most pleasant and enjoyable people to be around are not the ones who crack the most jokes. They are kind, considerate, empathetic and they take an interest in other people besides themselves.
Nonetheless, having some sense of humor is a good thing. They say that laughter is the best medicine.
Does having a dark sense of humor make you bad?
One time when I was a kid, I was thinking about how funny it would be if someone driving a car saw a Christmas lights display so beautiful and mesmerizing that she gets distracted and crashes her car. This is an example of a fictional scenario that may be funny to someone with a dark sense of humor.
So what is the difference between a dark sense of humor and a sense of humor characteristic of bad people? I believe the difference is that for the bad person to laugh, something bad has to actually happen to the person who is the target of the joke, whether it be physical or psychological harm. The person with a dark sense of humor, on the other hand, just needs to hear a story of the bad thing happening. The story certainly does not have to come true for people to laugh. Furthermore, when we laugh at a story that ends in a person crashing a car, we can always imagine that the person is perfectly okay afterwards and that the car can be repaired. In other words, we are not necessarily laughing at the thought of someone being harmed.
Recall a previous blog post on Treatment of Women on Television and Popular Culture where I discuss attempted rape scenes that are presented as funny. Does this qualify as just a dark sense of humor, or something more? Where we draw the dividing line, in my opinion, is in whether the unfortunate event includes substantial harm to a person and whether the wrongful act is portrayed as normal and okay. Note from the previous blog post that in two of the four attempted rape scenes I described, the woman was in a state of mental distress while the man was trying to rape her. In one of the other two attempted rape scenes, the attempted rape was successful. Though the woman was not in any mental distress, she did react to the rape in a way that no woman in her right mind would. She looked upon her rapist with admiration because he was so good at having sex for a nerd.
The 1993 film The Adams Family Values shows another round of dark humor where Fester’s wife is repeatedly trying to murder him so that she can take his money. Her repeated attempts to murder him are unsuccessful, though, and the whole thing is presented as being funny. Are we being bad when we laugh at this? I doubt it because at least Fester suffers no harm, physical or psychological, and Debby ends up getting what she deserves in the end.
While the person with the dark sense of humor laughs at stories of events that often result in harm, such a person would not necessarily laugh at the harm itself. The bad person, however, may laugh at the harm itself, and may even intentionally inflict harm—often psychological—for his/her own entertainment. The person who is the target of the joke may not have to sustain serious physical harm, but he/she still would need to be in some state of distress, anger, annoyance or confusion for the bad person to receive satisfactory entertainment.
Comedies on television
As discussed in the Television blog post, television is ridden with scenes that entice viewers to laugh at things that people should not be laughing at. In many movies and sitcoms, we are enticed to laugh at people getting harmed and at people intentionally hurting each other. In a culture where laughing at such things is the norm, it can be hard to know when we are laughing at something that bad people would typically laugh at.
So if you laugh at an anvil falling on a cartoon character’s head, does that mean that you are being a bad person? Not necessarily. Cartoon characters do not get hurt the way that real people get hurt. After a boulder rock falls on their head, they often see birds or stars, then a moment later they are good as new. However, watching comedic scenes of cartoon characters falling off a cliff or having pianos falling on their heads is a stepping stone closer to watching and laughing at real people getting hurt. I can testify that television successfully taught me to laugh at people getting hurt when I was a child. At first it was cartoon characters, then I laughed at live-action characters smashing dishes onto each other’s heads, then eventually I laughed at real people getting hurt. Beware of the desensitization that television can cause.
Summary
To summarize, we can learn a lot about someone’s true nature by what he/she laughs at and the kinds of jokes that he/she makes. Does he/she laugh a someone being in a state of distress (such as anger, annoyance or confusion)? Does he/she laugh when someone is struggling to complete a task and is expressing frustration? Does he/she laugh when the other person is obviously being serious? When he/she tells a joke, is his/her goal to bring laughter and joy to other people? Or is he/she just entertaining him/herself without regard to how others present are responding to the joke? Does he/she accuse others of not being able to take a joke? Or does he/she apologize when the joke offends someone?