Do you enjoy a sick joke? People with a dark and twisted sense of humour are more intelligent and emotionally stable

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People with a sick sense of humour scored highly on intelligence tests

They also had a higher emotional stability and lower aggression, the study says

This is because it takes cognitive and emotional skills to understand jokes

Comedians like Daniel Dwight Tosh and Frankie Boyle, along with films like Pulp Fiction all use examples of dark humour


Not everyone finds dark, twisted jokes funny.

But those who do are likely to be more intelligent, according to a new study.

Researchers found people who prefer dark humour tend to score highly on test of intelligence and emotional stability.

Psychologists from the Medical University of Vienna studied people's reactions to sick jokes, from a cartoon book called The Black Book by Uli Stein.

The researchers defined dark humour as 'a kind of humour that treats sinister subjects like death, disease, deformity, handicap or warfare with bitter amusement and presents such tragic, distressing or morbid topics in humorous terms'.

Comedians like Daniel Dwight Tosh and Frankie Boyle, along with films like Pulp Fiction all use examples of dark humour.

The researchers found this kind of sense of humour is a mark of intelligence.

'Black humour preference and comprehension are positively associated with higher verbal and nonverbal intelligence as well as higher levels of education,' the authors wrote in the study, published in the journal Cognitive Processing.