Everyone enjoys a good laugh. But apparently, the kind of humor that you enjoy might provide some insight into your mental health. According to Discover, there are four distinct styles of humor that people often use: affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, and self-defeating.
Affiliative humor refers to jokes that are typically considered funny to anyone and everyone. These might be relatable jokes that don’t require much context to understand, and they’ll probably be family friendly. Self-enhancing humor, on the other hand, involves jokes that allow the person telling them to laugh at themself and at life’s absurdities. This often includes making light of a situation where things didn’t go according to plan or where the person made a clumsy mistake.
Now, aggressive humor involves making jokes at the expense of someone else. This often involves punching down, and it might include sarcasm, teasing, or criticism. These kinds of jokes probably won’t be considered funny by everyone; they might even be seen as rude and/or offensive.
Finally, self-defeating humor involves putting yourself down to gain the approval of others. This means that you’re making yourself the butt of the joke, often to make fun of yourself before anyone else can. But these kinds of jokes can sometimes make others uncomfortable, if they feel a little bit too real.
Unsurprisingly, it’s the latter two styles of humor that can sometimes signal that mental health issues may be present. Julie Aitken Schermer, a psychological researcher at The University of Western Ontario, told Discover that individuals often using these styles of humor are actually more likely to self-harm. "Personally, I would argue that self-defeating humor is the most concerning style as it is also linked with loneliness and feelings of not mattering,” Schermer warns.
Now, the reason why this particular list of memes is so bizarre is likely because it’s full of Gen Z humor. And if you’re of an older generation or aren’t chronically online, you might not know exactly what that means.
According to Greenlight, the essence of Gen Z humor is absurdity and anti-humor. This young generation typically utilizes randomness and surprising juxtapositions in their jokes. This is different from Millennial humor, which is often centered around self-deprecation, nostalgia and being quirky.
Unsurprisingly, social media has played a huge part in shaping Zoomer humor. TikTok, in particular, has allowed trends to spread like wildfire. And the further a meme goes, the more outlandish it will become. Eventually, the captions aren’t making any sense, and they’re full of obscure references to other memes and internet trends. Yet somehow, they’re still hilarious, at least to those who are in on the joke.
These multi-layered Gen Z jokes are sometimes hard for us older folks to wrap our heads around. Essentially, it’s as if one person starts an inside joke, and it just snowballs into thousands of other inside jokes across the internet. Without any context, these bits can be extremely confusing.
“It's hard to understand why [these kinds of jokes are] funny unless you saw the original video and followed its evolution, which would require someone to have spent a lot of time on TikTok and be algorithmically served these videos, or have them shared within your community,” Andrew Lloyd writes for Business Insider.
