The way a person jokes may offer a subtle glimpse into their underlying psychological makeup and how they handle interpersonal relationships. A recent study published in the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts suggests that people who favor darker forms of humor, such as sarcasm and cynicism, tend to show higher levels of maladaptive personality traits. In contrast, those who use lighter, more playful humor tend to display fewer traits associated with personality disorders.
Humor is a universal human behavior that does more than just make people laugh. It serves as a tool for emotional regulation, social bonding, and communicating complex ideas. “Humor is one of the most fascinating forms of human communication, and I have been studying its psychological functions for about 15 years,” said lead author Alberto Dionigi, a psychologist and cognitive behavioral psychotherapist at the Noesis Clinical Center in Italy.
“I am a psychologist and Cognitive Behavioral Psychotherapist, and my main research interest is understanding how humor can influence the way we cope with emotions, relate to other people, and express our personality,” Dionigi explained. Psychologists often break humor down into different comic styles. Lighter styles include fun, benevolent humor, nonsense, and wit, which generally promote positive feelings and social connection.
Darker comic styles include irony, satire, sarcasm, and cynicism. These styles often rely on criticism, mockery, or a sense of superiority, which can strain relationships if used excessively. “We often think of humor as something inherently positive, but this is not always the case,” Dionigi said. “Humor can promote wellbeing, reduce stress, and facilitate social relationships, but it can also be used to criticize, distance ourselves from others, express hostility, or protect ourselves from vulnerability.”
Past research linking humor to personality mostly focused on standard traits, like extraversion or agreeableness. The authors of this new research wanted to explore how these eight specific comic styles align with a wider range of personality disorder traits.
“For this reason, we decided to investigate whether different ways of using humor are associated with specific maladaptive personality traits,” Dionigi added. “Rather than simply asking whether someone has a “good sense of humor,” we examined eight different comic styles, ranging from lighter forms such as fun, benevolent humor, nonsense, and wit to darker forms such as irony, satire, sarcasm, and cynicism.”
The scientists focused on a normative adult sample. This means they studied everyday people rather than patients formally diagnosed with a psychiatric condition. Mental health professionals recognize that personality disorder traits exist on a continuous spectrum. Many people possess subclinical levels of these traits, meaning they have certain cognitive or behavioral tendencies that do not meet the threshold for a full medical diagnosis.
The researchers surveyed 599 Italian adults with an average age of 40. Participants completed the survey online, answering questions from the Comic Style Markers questionnaire. This tool measures how frequently a person uses the eight different humor styles. The survey asked participants to rate statements on a scale from one to seven based on how well the descriptions matched their behavior.
For example, a statement measuring fun was “I am a funny joker,” while a statement measuring sarcasm was “Biting mockery suits me.” Next, the participants completed the Personality Belief Questionnaire-Short Form. This tool measures dysfunctional thinking patterns associated with ten different personality disorder traits. These traits include avoidant, dependent, passive-aggressive, obsessive-compulsive, antisocial, narcissistic, histrionic, schizoid, paranoid, and borderline tendencies.
An avoidant trait was measured with statements like “I should avoid unpleasant situations at all costs.” An antisocial trait was measured with statements such as “Force or cunning is the best way to get things done.” The researchers analyzed the collected data to see which personality traits predicted which humor styles. The authors controlled for the age and sex of the participants during their statistical analysis to isolate the effects of personality.
The findings indicate that darker comic styles are consistently linked to more problematic personality features. “I think the main message is that humor is not simply positive or negative: how we use humor matters,” Dionigi explained. “In our study of 599 Italian adults, we found that darker comic styles, particularly sarcasm and cynicism, were more strongly associated with maladaptive personality traits.”
Sarcasm and cynicism showed the strongest positive associations with passive-aggressive, antisocial, narcissistic, histrionic, and borderline traits. The statistical models explained up to 23 percent of the variance in the use of cynical humor. This indicates a moderate statistical relationship, meaning that almost a quarter of the differences in how often people use cynical humor can be predicted by these specific personality traits.
These patterns suggest that individuals with antagonistic or impulsive tendencies might use sarcasm and cynicism as socially acceptable ways to express dominance. “For example, they were related to traits involving interpersonal antagonism, distrust, hostility, and emotional dysregulation,” Dionigi said. “This does not mean, of course, that a sarcastic person has a personality disorder. Our participants came from the general population, and we investigated personality traits on a continuum, not clinical diagnoses.”
Irony and satire also showed positive links to maladaptive traits, though the associations were slightly weaker. Satire, which involves mocking foolish behavior to correct it, was associated with both narcissistic and obsessive-compulsive traits. The researchers propose that narcissistic individuals might use satire to mask their feelings of superiority in a socially acceptable format.
Meanwhile, those with obsessive-compulsive traits might use satirical humor as a way to enforce moral rules and maintain a sense of order. Irony was positively linked to borderline, paranoid, and obsessive-compulsive patterns. The authors suspect irony provides a cognitive distance that helps people regulate intense emotions. “Similarly, irony may sometimes help people create emotional distance from difficult experiences,” Dionigi noted.
The researchers caution against labeling any humor style as strictly good or bad. “One aspect I would emphasize is that our results should not be interpreted as saying that some forms of humor are “healthy” and others are “pathological.” Humor is much more complex than that,” Dionigi explained. “Even darker styles can have adaptive functions depending on the context. Satire, for example, can be used to criticize problematic behaviors or social norms and encourage reflection and change.”
Lighter comic styles were mostly isolated from these darker personality traits. “On the other hand, lighter forms of humor were generally less strongly related to maladaptive personality traits and were more connected with social affiliation, playfulness, and cognitive flexibility,” Dionigi added. Fun and benevolent humor showed weak or negative associations with maladaptive tendencies.
Avoidant personality traits, which involve a deep fear of social rejection, were negatively associated with fun, benevolent humor, nonsense, and wit. People with high avoidant traits tend to withdraw from social situations, which likely reduces their opportunities to engage in playful banter and share jokes.
“A frequent reliance on cynical or sarcastic humor, for example, may sometimes offer clues about hostility, distrust, or the need to maintain emotional distance, while difficulty using more affiliative forms of humor may be associated with social withdrawal or vulnerability,” Dionigi said.
The histrionic personality trait, characterized by excessive attention-seeking and emotionality, heavily predicted the use of fun and humor. Individuals with these traits may use playful jokes to maintain the spotlight and engage with their audience. Wit, which involves clever verbal associations, was positively associated with narcissism, suggesting that self-enhancing individuals might use intellectual humor to impress others. Additionally, men in the sample reported higher scores on the darker, more maladaptive forms of humor than women did.
“So, perhaps the most interesting takeaway is that our sense of humor may tell us something about the way we relate to ourselves and to other people,” Dionigi said. “Humor can be a way of connecting, playing, and sharing positive emotions, but it can also become a socially acceptable way of expressing hostility, keeping emotional distance, or defending ourselves.”
A cross-sectional design was used for this research, meaning all data was collected at a single point in time. This setup indicates associations between variables but cannot determine cause and effect. “An important caveat is that this was a cross-sectional study, so we cannot establish causality,” Dionigi explained. “We can say that certain personality traits and comic styles are associated, but we cannot say that personality traits cause a particular type of humor, or vice versa.”
The study relied entirely on self-reported questionnaires. People often lack objective self-awareness, especially regarding their own negative traits, and they may answer in ways that make them look better than they actually are.
“Humor is a highly interpersonal behavior, so future studies could include ratings from partners, friends, or clinicians, as well as behavioral measures of how people actually use humor in real-life interactions,” Dionigi noted.
The sample consisted primarily of Italian adults, and nearly 73 percent of the participants were women. This demographic imbalance and specific cultural setting might limit how well the findings apply to other populations. “Our sample was also composed mainly of nonclinical Italian adults, so the findings should not automatically be generalized to people diagnosed with personality disorders or to other cultures,” Dionigi said.
Future studies could track people over time and across different cultures to better understand how humor and personality interact throughout a lifespan.
“One question I find particularly interesting for future research is whether it is not only which humor style people use, but also how effectively they use it that matters,” Dionigi explained. “Two people may both use sarcasm, for example, but with very different interpersonal effects. It would also be interesting to study these relationships in clinical populations and among professional humor performers.”
As a psychotherapist, Dionigi hopes this research encourages people to think more deeply about their own habits. “So, rather than asking “Is humor good or bad?”, perhaps we should ask: “What kind of humor am I using, with whom, and what function is it serving in this particular moment?””
The study, “Humor and Personality Disorders: Associations Between Comic Styles and Maladaptive Personality Traits in a Normative Adult Sample,” was authored by Alberto Dionigi, Mirko Duradoni, and Laura Vagnoli.