When is a joke about a tragic situation “too soon?” New research published in the July issue of Social Psychological and Personality Science found it took a little over a month for people find jokes about Hurricane Sandy acceptable.
“Despite the strong intuition that the passage of time enhances humor in the face of tragedy, little empirical evidence exists to support this claim,” A. Peter McGraw of the University of Colorado Boulder, the lead author, wrote in the study. “We narrow the knowledge gap using responses to a real tragedy and measuring how humor changes in real time. We find that temporal distance creates a comedic sweet spot. A tragic event is difficult to joke about at first, but the passage of time initially increases humor as the event become less threatening. Eventually, however, distance decreases humor by making the event seem completely benign.”
The study was co-authored by Lawrence E. Williams and Caleb Warren.
Hurricane Sandy devastated the coastline of New Jersey and parts of New York in 2012. But before the superstorm had even made landfall, someone on the social media website Twitter had created an account named “AHurricaneSandy” and was sending out a series of jokes about the impending natural disaster.
The researchers utilized the “AHurricaneSandy” Twitter account for their study. They had a total of 1,064 participants evaluate the extent to which they found three tweets from the account to be funny, humorous, upsetting, offensive, boring, irrelevant, and confusing. Some of the participants evaluated the tweets one day before Hurricane Sandy hit, others evaluated the tweets the day the hurricane made landfall, while others evaluated the tweets days and weeks following the disaster.
The study found that people viewed jokes from “AHurricaneSandy” as more humorous the day before the storm hit compared to the immediate days afterwards.
“As the psychological reality of the tragedy set in, humor declined,” McGraw and his colleagues noted.
Humor bottomed out on November 14, 2012, about two weeks after the storm had wreaked havoc. But it slowly became acceptable to find humor in the disaster. By December 5, 2012, the humor perceived in the tweets hit its highest point. After that point, however, the jokes became less and less funny. Humor hit another low point 99 days after the storm.
It’s likely that other tragedies would produce similar patterns, but differ in length depending on their severity and other circumstances, the researchers said.
“Future work can build upon these initial investigations, examining the spectrum of factors that influence the process by which it becomes acceptable to find humor in tragedy.”
The researchers believe their findings support the benign violation theory of humor.
“The theory proposes that humor arises when something that threatens a person’s well-being, identity, or normative belief structure (i.e., a violation) simultaneously seems okay, safe, or acceptable,” McGraw and his colleagues explained in the study. “The benign violation theory highlights the two ways a situation can fail to be humorous. A situation may be purely violating (e.g., being tickled by a creepy stranger) or purely benign (e.g., tickling oneself); neither produces humor. Humor requires threat but not too much or too little.”
In regards to Hurricane Sandy, the findings suggest that people found jokes too violating in the days and weeks after the terrible disaster. As time went on, people found the situation to be less threatening and therefore more humorous. But eventually, the situation became so unthreatening as to be unfunny.
“The key to avoiding a ‘too soon’ comedy fail or a ‘too late’ comedy dud is matching the right degree of violation with the right amount of distance. With this in mind, we propose a modification to the popular saying, ‘humor is tragedy plus time.’ Transforming tragedy into comedy requires time, not too little yet not too much,” the researchers concluded.
