Humor and Depressive Realism:
Laughter as an Embodiment of the Death Drive
Julie Reshe
1 January 2025
There is something brutally honest and painful about laughter. Perhaps laughter is the deepest form of pain. Maybe only laughter reveals how much it really hurts.
Humor is rarely invoked in the most profound philosophical discussions that deal with the fundamental aspects of our existence. It is often dismissed as trivial and unserious, seen merely as a brief escape from the heavy burden of existence—a secondary phenomenon that can be set aside when addressing what is considered truly important. Humor is even less likely to be mentioned when discussing the darker aspects of human life. It is generally perceived as the opposite of negative phenomena such as despair, depression, anxiety, and trauma. Accordingly, in most pessimistic viewpoints that reveal life's inherent tragedy, humor is not given a significant role. Even when it is acknowledged within a pessimistic framework, it is often overshadowed by tragedy.
Intuitively, we tend to place humor and depression at opposite ends of the spectrum, imagining them as polar opposites. However, from the negative viewpoint I embrace—where every aspect of existence carries a dark, anxious heart—humor is not the antithesis of depression but rather closely connected to it. As Kierkegaard observed, everything unravels into despair and anxiety, even—or perhaps especially—happiness. For him, "anxiety [...] is the pivot upon which everything turns" (Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 43). In his view, cheerfulness is also a form of despair, a mask that conceals the deeper, darker aspects of existence.
Simon Critchley captures the deep connection between humor and depression (though, unfortunately, he never fully develops it), suggesting that depression is at the heart of humor: "The dark heart of humour, what an oddity the human being is in the universe. It is this moment when the laughter dies away, the black sun of depression at the center of the comic universe, that irresistibly attracts me. In humour, we orbit eccentrically around a black sun" (Critchley, 2002, p. 50).
This essay aims to elaborate on the connection between humor and the dark aspects of existence. I will attempt to place humor at the center of pessimistic philosophy and depressive realism, understanding it not as a fleeting escape, but as something rooted in trauma, depression, anxiety, disappearance, and death.
Philosophical Pessimism, Depressive Realism, and Humor
Depressive realism and philosophical pessimism define human existence as inherently tragic. The stance of depressive realism suggests that depression is linked to a more realistic comprehension of the world. Trauma, pain, and tragedy are associated with the truths that human reflection uncovers—whether these truths concern our mortality or the absurdity of existence.
In classical depressive realism and philosophical pessimism, humor, if discussed at all, is often seen as secondary to the more central themes of suffering and despair. As mentioned, I aim to propose a form of depressive realism that incorporates humor, placing it at the very core—not merely as something secondary, but as something inherently linked to the pain of existence and depression. This approach might allow humor to voice what depressive realism leaves unsaid in its humorless form.
This version of depressive realism would still recognize the inherent suffering, futility, and tragic nature of existence, but it would understand humor as an integral part of this experience, rather than as a mere coping mechanism or fleeting escape. I see humor not as the opposite of despair, but as a way of confronting it—an embodiment of the absurdity and contradictions of existence that depressive realism emphasizes.
To formulate the role of humor in this version of depressive realism, we can first turn to several pessimistic philosophers who have already explored the role of comedy. Schopenhauer is regarded as the most significant philosophical pessimist. For him, human existence is inherently full of suffering, characterized by endless pain and a profound sense of futility. He saw life as a cycle of yearning and temporary relief, with happiness being just a brief respite from suffering. Yet, Schopenhauer’s view also reveals a connection between comedy and tragedy. He observes that, “The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy” (Schopenhauer, 1966, p. 322). This suggests that comedy and tragedy are not opposites, the distinction between comedy and tragedy lies in the scale or lens through which one comprehends human existence. This tragic lens highlights the universal struggles of the human condition—endless cycles of desire and loss, and the inescapable reality of death. Yet, when we shift to the scale of day-to-day experiences, it’s the small and ridiculous moments of life that stand out. Here, the focus is on life's mundane absurdities, the ironies in human behavior, and those moments when reality subverts our expectations. These details reveal the comedic side of existence, where the grand concerns of tragedy are undercut by the absurdity of life's minutiae. The tragic nature of life doesn’t exclude its comedic aspect, and vice versa. While tragedy captures the grand, overarching suffering of existence, comedy captures the small, absurd stuff of our daily struggles—the actual stuff of life.
In this framework, comedy can be seen as more tragic than tragedy because it operates on the level of everyday life. Tragedy often deals with grand themes and heroic struggles, elevating human suffering to a cosmic scale. This grandeur can be seen as a form of escapism, offering a sense of nobility that distances itself from the absurdity of reality. Comedy, however, is a direct immersion into the absurdities and contradictions of daily existence. It confronts the ridiculousness of everyday struggles, exposing the raw truth without the comforting veil of glory. While tragedy might offer a sense of meaning or resolution, comedy directly confronts the absurdity.
While the general framework of Schopenhauer’s philosophy may suggest resignation as a way to escape suffering, Nietzsche, though following Schopenhauer in acknowledging the tragic and painful nature of existence, argued instead for an affirmation of life with all its suffering. Nonetheless, Nietzsche can still be considered a depressive realist in the sense that, for him, the truth of existence remains tragic, comprehended through pain. Nietzsche defines a human being as a tragic animal and, in this way, coincides with depressive realism, but he also importantly adds the element of laughter to it. He writes, “Perhaps I know best why man alone laughs: he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter. The unhappiest and most melancholy animal is, as is fitting, the most cheerful” (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 56).
For Nietzsche, laughter seems to serve as compensation, or rather, as a necessity to balance the pain of existence. In his view, the pain defining human existence comes first: the pain of confronting the truth of being, which aligns him with a depressive realism position (and the anthropocentric problem that comes with it). Only then does laughter enter, as something secondary to the tragedy. While Nietzsche is illuminating in his intertwining of comedy and tragedy, he still keeps tragedy at the forefront. His position does not allow the centrality of tragedy to be replaced by humor.
If we push Nietzsche’s intertwining further, putting humor at the center and letting it take the place of tragedy, while still keeping the lens of depressive realism, we might say that humans laugh because this laughter is not a way to compensate—but a genuine expression of melancholy itself. Laughter mocks human suffering, stripping it of its superiority and dignity. In doing so, it removes suffering’s protective layer, exposing it not as something noble, but as an absurd and laughable aspect of the human condition.
Another thinker who can be considered tragic is Heidegger. Although he did not explicitly address humor or comedy, his exploration of the absurdity and groundlessness of existence, particularly through his concept of Angst, can be seen as related to the absurdity at the core of humor.
Angst, a profound sense of anxiety, is, for Heidegger, the defining feature of human existence. One might experiment with substituting Angst for laughter or the ridiculous. Just as anxiety exposes the strangeness and disorientation of our existence, laughter, too, reveals the absurdity of being. In existential terms, we experience thrownness—a sense of being cast into the world without explanation or purpose. Laughter, like anxiety, disrupts our familiar sense of reality, making the known seem strange. It reveals the arbitrary nature of societal norms and values. In humor, we find ourselves "thrown," confronted with the absurdity of our condition. Through laughter, we expose coherence as nothing more than an illusion.
While anxiety is weighed down by a serious tone, humor more honestly captures the absurdity of existence. Humor reveals the triviality of the self and the absurd nature of reality. It uncovers the incoherent elements of being, exposing existence as a dark, cosmic joke.
Comedy Beyond Tragedy
In his paper Comedy and Finitude: Displacing the Tragic-Heroic Paradigm in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, which is particularly relevant to our discussion, Simon Critchley distinguishes between two philosophical approaches to confronting human finitude: the tragic-heroic paradigm and the comic anti-heroic paradigm. He highlights the dominance of the tragic paradigm within the German intellectual tradition, notably in the works of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, but most significantly in Heidegger. While we've considered the possibility of reframing Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger’s views to place humor at the center, Critchley suggests, and I agree, that their positions remain rooted in a fundamentally tragic stance rather than a comic one.
Critchley observes that, within this tradition, the subject is often framed as a tragic hero—someone who accepts loss and embraces the inevitability of death. For Heidegger, for instance, this acceptance of finitude, or being-towards-death, is central to authenticity. Authentic existence, in this sense, involves heroically confronting the tragedy of finitude and remaining open to one's thrownness and the fundamental nothingness at the core of being. From this perspective, we are called to bravely embrace finitude, become tragic heroes, and, through this, attain authentic existence. While this might sound inspiring, there is a problem with this position.
Critchley argues that this problematic tragic paradigm continues in Lacanian psychoanalysis, particularly in Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Here, the ethical subject of psychoanalysis is required to act in conformity with their desire, no matter the cost. This ethical imperative aligns with the tragic-heroic approach. To embrace one's desire in this way means accepting the inevitable loss that follows. This demand mirrors the acceptance of finitude, much like Heidegger's notion of being-towards-death, where the subject must confront and embrace the limits of existence to achieve authenticity. In both cases, the subject faces the unavoidable reality of loss and finitude, which must be embraced for a truly authentic existence.
Critchley questions this heroic framework of the German tradition and Lacanian psychoanalysis, instead advocating for the comic anti-heroic paradigm, provocatively stating that the problem with tragedy is that it is not truly tragic enough. He argues that “tragedy is insufficiently tragic because it is too heroic. Only comedy is truly tragic. And it is tragic by not being a tragedy" (Critchley, 1999, p. 119). In tragedy, the hero occupies a position of grandiosity; their actions, while acknowledging finitude, also serve to assert their significance. This heroic aspect of embracing finitude can be seen as a form of compensation or an escape from the genuine acknowledgement of the reality of existence. In this sense, tragedy still offers a form of consolation—a sense of dignity and purpose in the face of the absurdity of existence.
In contrast, Critchley suggests that comedy offers a more genuine and modest account of human finitude. Unlike the tragic hero, who confronts finitude by seeking authenticity with an elevated sense of significance, the comic perspective embraces inauthenticity and failure. Comedy is a failed tragedy, which makes it even more tragic than tragedy itself.
Laughter reveals the true nature of our finitude, as it doesn’t attempt to affirm it in a grandiose manner but instead comically acknowledges it. It confronts the absurdity of existence without the heroic posture. In comedy, there is no compensation and no heroic transgression of one's limitations. Instead, there is a sense of humility and an acceptance of inauthenticity.
Laughter strips away the arrogance and grandeur of the tragic hero, bringing us back to our limits. In laughter, we most closely align with the reality of our existence as failure and absurdity, while tragedy seeks to elevate or escape this recognition. In this sense, comedy is more tragic than tragedy because it offers no escape and no heroic affirmation.
Humor and Anxiety
While laughter, when discussed in relation to anxiety, is often thought of as a response or safety mechanism for dealing with it—a form of relief from anxiety—Alfie Bown establishes a more profound link between anxiety and laughter. He suggests that laughter is not just a relief from anxiety, in a way, it is anxiety itself. In his words, "laughter is always unsettling precisely because it contains anxiety and indicates its continuing threat" (Bown, 2019, p. 113). While he agrees that it is correct to see laughter as a way to deal with anxiety or a promise of relief, more importantly, laughter simultaneously brings anxiety back. Laughter does not simply remove anxiety, instead, it contains anxiety within itself and returns us to it.
Elaborating on Mauron’s account of anxiety and laughter, Bown demonstrates that even the so-called laughter of superiority—performed out of a sense of dominance, laughing at others and finding them laughable—does not escape this profound link with anxiety. It is, in fact, an anxious laugh. The superiority established in such laughter is only momentarily sustained against a deeper perception of one’s own weakness and inferiority. It is, rather, a failed attempt at superiority that leaves the subject in an anxious position. This laughter, Bown explains, "risks revealing that there is nothing behind the superiority it establishes or at least showing how fragile those structures of superiority are" (Bown, 2019, p. 119).
In his upcoming book, Bown further develops his theory of comedy within the framework of a post-Lacanian understanding of the subject as constituted around lack. He explains this anxiety of laughter, noting that it evokes the uncanny, serving as a reminder of the lack at the heart of subjectivity: "Comedy confronts us with the lack at the heart of subjectivity. Revealing this lack operates in a universalist way: it connects us to each other" (Bown, 2024, p. 6). In light of this, he concludes that "comedy touches upon a primary anxiety by approaching it to move away from it" (Bown, 2024, p. 78). This idea resonates with Todd McGowan, who writes, "Tragic heroes refuse to accept their status as a finite lacking being […] Comic heroes, in contrast, remain constantly aware of their status as lacking subjects" (McGowan, 2017, p. 77).
Incorporating all these thoughts, we can begin to formulate a conception of depressive realism and philosophical pessimism with humor at its center. In a similar vein to Critchley’s statement that tragedy is not tragic enough and that only comedy is real tragedy, we might argue that depressive realism is not depressive enough. It still suggests a reassuring idea that depression offers something in return, promising favorable outcomes like a realistic comprehension of the world or hard-won authenticity, or knowledge that is painful yet truthful. However, if we replace this notion with humor, what emerges is comic realism, which is an actual depressive realism. It gives you nothing except for depression, you are just pathetic. If authenticity is what you were hoping for, it reveals the inauthenticity at the core and the truth of authenticity as the impossibility of authenticity. If it’s knowledge, then it is so realistic that it ceases to be knowledge—like an awareness of the impossibility of knowledge, a self-subversive kind of knowledge, where knowledge becomes just a joke.
Humor as Death Driven
According to one of the main theories of humor, the incongruity theory, discussed in the works of, among others, Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, humor emerges from the gap between what we anticipate and what actually happens. A joke sets up a certain expectation, but the punchline subverts it in an unexpected way. For example, imagine someone confidently giving a speech, only to suddenly lose their train of thought. The humor comes from the gap between the polished image they present and the awkward reality that unfolds instead. Humor, then, emerges from the experience of a felt non-coincidence between our expectations and reality. Bown includes the playful joke: “What do you call a fish with no eyes? A fsh” (p. 29). This joke serves as an example of comedy's ability to disrupt expectations and showcase the contingent nature of language, a recurring theme in his exploration of humor.
Psychoanalytically, we might say that if this fundamental incongruity—this gap or rupture—lies at the core of both the subject and being itself, then laughter becomes a way of encountering that gap. According to psychoanalytic theory, the subject exists in a state of radical non-self-coincidence, continually failing to align with themselves. Encountering this gap is inherently traumatic, as it reflects the fundamental misalignment between the subject and reality itself. In this sense, laughter can be understood as an expression of that trauma. Accordingly, humor is far from being merely a light-hearted phenomenon. It serves as a means of confronting the structural incongruity that defines human existence. Seen in this light, laughter becomes a way of encountering the inherent lack at the core of our being, a lack that simultaneously gives rise to both trauma and comedy.
Following Todd McGowan, we can think of the psychoanalytic concept of the death drive, seen as our core drive, as the repetition of a traumatic encounter with the lack—a structural void at the heart of our subjectivity, society, and reality itself (McGowan, 2013). Encountering this void is profoundly traumatic, but it also compels a confrontation with the fundamental truth of existence. This psychoanalytic lens, combined with incongruity theory and its focus on rupture, allows us to comprehend comedy as the embodiment of the death drive.
The work of the death drive is conventionally seen as tragic, given its destructive and self-sabotaging nature. But in fact, comedy seems to resonate even more closely with the death drive than tragedy, or at the very least, comedy is more honest about it. Similar to tragedy, comedy is an encounter with nothingness, a direct confrontation with the void, with laughter as the body’s response to this confrontation. Both tragedy and comedy perceive existential incongruity, the structural non-coincidence in reality, but tragedy conceals it with the nobility and pathos of the tragic narrative. Comedy, on the other hand, does the opposite, exposing the absurdity of this incongruity through laughter and acknowledging the turmoil without offering any resolution. When we laugh, we give form to this nothingness, embodying the death drive in its rawest expression. As Alenka Zupančič observes, “[Comedy] gives voice and body to the impasses and contradictions of this materiality itself” (Zupančič, 2008, p. 47).
When we consider laughter as an embodied response, it can be seen as a form of repetition compulsion—one way of defining the death drive in Freudian terms. Described by Critchley as a “spasmodic contraction and relaxation of the facial muscles, with corresponding movements in the diaphragm” (Critchley, 2002, p. 8), laughter, as a bodily phenomenon, can be understood as the embodiment of the repetition compulsion—the meaningless, compulsive repetition at the heart of living. If life is nothing more than a shudder of death, laughter is its physical echo. Laughter is a convulsion, a glitch of the body that mirrors the glitching inherent to the universe itself. This glitching of the body reflects the larger, cosmic glitching of reality, where meaning and coherence break down, leaving us to confront the incongruous fabric of existence.
In a similar way, weeping can be seen as an equally absurd bodily glitch. Despite scientific attempts to find meaning in tears, such as their role in releasing stress hormones, there remains something profoundly absurd about the fact that, in moments of despair, the body’s best response is to produce water—intensely moisturizing itself as a universal reaction to life's hardships. I’m uncertain how to fully differentiate between laughter and tears when suggesting that both can be understood as bodily embodiments of repetition compulsion, as they seem to overlap in some ways while also standing in opposition. However, it’s fascinating that when they do coincide—when one laughs and cries at the same time—each seems to amplify the other, their contrast heightening the intensity of both.
Laughter and tears, since they imply a loss of self-control, can be seen as a dissolution of the self. Both can be viewed as a transition into a more profound encounter with the self—a self exposed as lack, as nothingness, merging with its own non-being. The body reacts with meaningless convulsions when faced with this nothingness, glitching and becoming a material witness to the fact that it is the embodiment of the death drive, exposing itself as an act of repetition compulsion.
Humor, at its core, is inherently self-annihilative. Critchley distinguishes between authentic and inauthentic humor, where the latter involves annihilating the other by laughing at them. In contrast, authentic humor is self-annihilative, it’s about turning the humor on oneself. As Critchley explains, “true humour does not wound a specific victim and always contains self-mockery. The object of laughter is the subject who laughs” (Critchley, 2002, p. 14). It’s a self-undoing act, revealing the self’s own nothingness and fragility rather than attacking the other.
If genuine laughter includes self-mockery, it becomes a self-destructive act, uncovering humor as a manifestation of the death drive. It is a confrontation with oneself as nothing, and through this, with the void at the core of others and reality. Humor carries an intersubjective dimension, exposing the nothingness within us and connecting us to the void in others. Sharing a joke becomes an act of encountering and merging with this shared absence. The convulsions of laughter are contagious, spreading between subjects and creating a solidarity rooted in the shared exposure to nothingness. I am pathetic, you are pathetic, and everything else is fleeting and insignificant by comparison.
Laughter as Salvation from Salvation
There is a tendency in recent theories of humor to emphasize its social or political potential, positioning it as a tool for transformation. For example, Critchley attributes a missionary function to humor, viewing it as capable of challenging and shifting dominant narratives. Alfie Bown sees comedy as having revolutionary power, suggesting it can give rise to universal solidarity.
While I remain critical of the idea that humor has any practical value or capacity to bring about salvation or revolutionary change, I do appreciate that both Critchley and Bown, in discussing humor’s transformative role, emphasize its subversive position in relation to such aspirations. Ironically, Critchley’s redemptive humor is anything but redemptive, and Bown’s revolutionary humor is simultaneously anti-revolutionary—turning their own theories into self-subversive jokes.
According to Critchley, while the Christian missionary promise offers salvation from this world, inviting believers to look beyond human limitations toward a transcendent reality where suffering is miraculously overcome, humor takes an entirely opposite approach. Humor grounds us by showing that there is no transcendent dimension to escape to. As Critchley puts it, “humour does not redeem us from this world, but returns us to it ineluctably by showing that there is no alternative” (Critchley, 2002, p. 17). One could say that humor’s self-subversive power of salvation lies in its ability to save us from salvation itself. Unlike religion, which offers salvation by escaping the absurdities of the world, humor directly confronts them.
However, Critchley argues that this grounding—being brought back into this world through humor and abandoning any hope for something beyond it—holds the possibility for real improvement. It makes us recognize that it is up to us, and not some external force, to make a difference.
While Bown seems, on the one hand, to distinguish truly revolutionary comedy—which, by revealing the shared lack at our core, can inspire universal solidarity—from corrupt comedy that serves capitalist interests by dividing us and reinforcing existing hierarchies, his theory is more nuanced than a simple call to reject bad capitalist comedy and embrace good revolutionary humor. Bown’s theory is self-subversive; he argues that comedy structurally contains a kind of doubleness, participating in the current order while simultaneously subverting it.
For him, this means that even “corrupted” comedy holds a subversive revolutionary potential. However, his theory can also be interpreted the other way around—that even "good" revolutionary comedy is self-subversive and simultaneously anti-revolutionary, suggesting that any idea of revolution is a joke in itself. This interpretation is particularly precious to me as it exposes the fragility of the hope for revolution that we dearly cling to. It painfully strips this hope away while simultaneously showing that it is all we have, subverting it into nothingness that we share in common. The hope for revolution might be viewed as another mask for the lack, revealing itself as a joke once we remove the mask and drawing us into the shared nothingness.
I see humor as standing in opposition to the idea of any improvement. For me, humor is defined by its negative nature. While it may appear to have positive outcomes, this positivity is not a core aspect of humor. It might have a revolutionary quality, but it simultaneously negates and mocks the very idea of revolution. It offers salvation, but only as a joke—a salvation from salvation (Peter Rollins’ famous joke). At its core, humor is destructive and subversive. If it brings about creation, it does so through tearing down—destruction before creation. If humor serves creation, improvement, or betterment, then it ceases to be humor. If it is not for nothing, then it is not funny.
The desire for salvation or revolution is propelled by hope, while the space of destruction where humor operates is one of hopelessness. If it offers hope, it’s a self-undermining hope, or hope for nothing (borrowing from Javier Rivera’s formulation). Humor can be seen as a form of relief, to the extent that relief involves loss, letting go, and self-annihilation. It burns through everything heavy, leaving only the lightness of ashes behind, exposing the true nature of everything: nothingness. The subversiveness is where humor’s sincerity and lightness lie, in contrast to any form of salvation or revolution, which always carries a trace of falsity and manipulation. The sound of laughter is the sound of hope leaving the body—a farewell song to hope. If it’s true that one cannot live without hope, then laughter, in its deepest sense, is a form of suicide.
Dark humor (Warning: Insensitive Content—Optional Reading)
Dark humor is often seen as downplaying experiences that would normally evoke fear, anguish, or horror. It acknowledges the gravity of these realities while simultaneously undermining them through laughter. From this perspective, dark humor can be understood as a way of confronting the harsh realities of life, exposing their structural absurdity and the irony in suffering and despair. Such a comprehension conveniently sidesteps the cruelty of this type of humor, allowing it to be taken lightly without considering its darker implications. The cruelty of such humor is often dismissed since it’s “just humor.”
If one admits the cruelty of such humor, it becomes awkward to bring up dark humor when discussing humor in general, especially if the aim is to present humor as a wonderful, transformative phenomenon. It's easier to dismiss any form or aspect of humor that doesn’t fit this narrative as a corrupted or false type of humor, something that deviates from 'proper' humor. One avoids bringing it into discussion without simultaneously distancing oneself from it.
Dark humor is often linked to numbness, seen as both resulting from and having an anesthetizing effect on horror. This is where the cruelty of such humor originates. It can be easily perceived as an inhuman response since a genuine human reaction to horror requires empathy, compassion, or shared pain. Dark humor, however, laughs at and mocks everything we feel should be approached with solemnity and gravity—like death, illness, violence, trauma, or abuse. For this reason, it is difficult to associate dark humor with humanity; instead, it appears to reflect inhumanity and insensitivity toward things that, in a humane context, should provoke pain and remain beyond the reach of humor.
How can anyone perceive humanity in laughing about atrocities committed during war, such as mass murder, dismemberment, or rape? In fact, for some of those committing these acts, the violence itself may already serve as a form of cruel humor or sadistic amusement. The idea of laughter as a loss of self, an embrace of revealing oneself as nothing, may seem attractive (it is definitely attractive to me), but it loses its attractiveness when this loss of self manifests as numbness in the face of cruelty—when there’s no empathy left inside. What if this selfless laughter represents not solidarity with others through the shared embrace of pain, but rather inner numbness and a loss of humanity within oneself?
Perhaps the need to reject and distance ourselves from this kind of dark laughter, and the cruelty of those who engage in it, arises because they lay bare a truth we desperately try to hide—the pervasive and ineradicable universal cruelty that we share, the fact we must be in denial of in order to preserve our so-called "humanity." What we consider "humanity" might be nothing more than a fragile facade that masks our own latent numbness—the type of numbness that is possible to pass off as socially acceptable. Those who openly embody cruelty and numbness in a more straightforward way, who have lost the ability to maintain the mask, become scapegoats for the numbness we deny in ourselves. Their lack of a mask exposes our own lurking cruelty, and this is what truly terrifies us.
Having said this, I’ll now quickly retreat back to the safety of Critchley’s distinction between selfless humor and its corrupted counterpart. As Critchley argues, authentic humor involves self-ridicule, setting it apart from inauthentic humor, which ridicules others. In psychoanalytic terms, this is the kind of humor that conceals one's own lack while exposing it in others, as seen in racist or sexist jokes. This distinction can also be applied to dark humor—it is only truly dark if it is self-annihilative. This self-annihilation can even be seen as literally embodied. Take, for example, the joke that Hitler did one good thing—he killed Hitler. His suicide becomes the ultimate punchline, the clearest expression of dark, self-annihilative humor. In this sense, I can only hope that Putin’s sense of humor is no less dark than Hitler’s (I wonder if this dark joke of mine should be considered authentic or inauthentic).
From this perspective, humor that embodies violence, where one exposes another’s lack while trying to conceal one’s own, is not authentic dark humor. It’s incomplete because it focuses solely on exposing and ridiculing the weaknesses of others without turning that ridicule inward.
It seems obvious that one should not laugh at war, while there’s something profoundly absurd about it—a ridiculousness we’re not allowed to acknowledge given the tremendous suffering it involves. Similarly, with rape, there is a painful absurdity in the act of dehumanization, where the complexity of a whole person can be reduced to mere flesh. Perhaps one cannot laugh at war or rape, despite their absurdity, because this is a sacred form of laughter that belongs to those who have endured it. It is those whose laughter resonates with the loss of themselves. It becomes a way of reclaiming the destruction caused by the abuser, transforming it into an act of self-destruction.
For example, someone could joke about the recent Russian airstrike on the Ukrainian retirement home: “Why waste missiles on people who are going to die soon anyway?” This would be a horrible, insensitive joke, numb to the suffering of others, but only if it is told by anyone other than the victims themselves. If it is uttered by the victims, it becomes a touching, self-annihilating kind of dark joke that reveals the truth and absurdity of both war and human existence in general.
Similarly, as a Ukrainian, I can make a joke about how there’s no point in trying to destroy a country that has been perfectly efficient at self-destruction since gaining independence. But unless you’re Ukrainian yourself, you’re not allowed to laugh at it.
Maybe there’s a kind of laughter—the true dark humor—that belongs only to those who are already dead, who never survived, and perhaps it’s the only genuine form of laughter.
Julie Reshe is the 'negative psychoanalyst'. Her work and courses are available at juliereshe.com. She is author of several books on psychoanalysis and is currently Visiting Professor at University College Cork.
References
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Bown, A. (2024). Postcomedy. Polity.
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