Gallows Humor

People who are going through tough times apparently have better senses of humor than people who aren’t, according to the cartoon editor at the New Yorker:

One of the ideas about humor is that it’s our way of coping with negative feelings. In a control study we found people who were primed with negative emotions, through images of illness and death at a subliminal level, create more and funnier captions than those who were not. (Via.)

My chaplaincy training included the idea that humor is good. People in the hospital don’t want a stand-up act, but they would rather have visitors who bring some levity than people who are weighed down with gravity.