The Distance Inside a Joke: How Humor Shapes the Way We Read One Another

Types of humor can close distance, or create it

Humor helps us break through awkwardness, tame a stressful situation, and say something difficult without excessive gravity. Yet the same mechanism can work in another way.

A barbed retort, a sarcastic comment, or a joke aimed at someone can mark superiority or express anger in a form that allows for an easy retreat: “I was only joking.” That is why what matters is not only whether a joke makes people laugh, but also what it does to the relationship between them.

Psychologists Alberto Dionigi, Mirko Duradoni, and Laura Vagnoli tried to capture this difference. In a study published in 2026 in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, they examined how different ways of joking relate to personality traits that, when more pronounced, can make it harder to function in relationships.

8 styles instead of a simple divide between funny and unfunny people

The study included 599 Italian adults, and the participants were not patients with diagnosed personality disorders. Dionigi’s team did not simply ask them whether they had a sense of humor. Instead, it examined which forms of joking they used most often. The researchers worked with a division into 8 comic styles: fun, benevolent humor, nonsense, wit, irony, satire, sarcasm, and cynicism.

This model is more detailed than the division often used in research into 4 humor styles: affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, and self-defeating. A 2016 study by Virgil Zeigler-Hill and colleagues showed that aggressive humor more often co-occurred with antagonism and impulsivity, while the 2 more supportive styles were linked with lower levels of negative emotionality and detachment from people.

The Italian study develops this line of inquiry because, instead of using the broad category of “aggressive humor,” it allows us to distinguish sarcasm, cynicism, irony, and satire from one another. This distinction matters. All of them can be sharp, critical, or based on mockery, but each of these styles affects the relationship between the person joking and their interlocutor in a different way.

Sarcasm and cynicism can push people apart

The clearest pattern concerned sarcasm and cynicism. People who more often used these forms of humor also more often reported traits that may make relationships with others more difficult. These included greater hostility and distrust, impulsivity, a strong focus on the self, and difficulties regulating emotions.

Sarcasm and cynicism, however, are not the same thing. Sarcasm usually targets a specific person, their behavior, or a particular situation. It is a cutting form of mockery that can wound, even when presented as harmless fun. Cynicism is a broader attitude: it rests on questioning widely accepted values, norms, and other people’s good intentions.

Satire criticizes, but it does not always aim to wound

In the same model, satire receives a different description. It too can be sharp and can ridicule weakness, but its meaning does not have to end with humiliation. Satire can point to social absurdities, hypocrisy, or abuses of power, and through criticism it can prompt its audience to reflect or change. The study’s authors note that what distinguishes satire from sarcasm and cynicism is an element of moral criticism and an intention to correct.

This does not mean that every person who uses sarcasm has a personality disorder, or that cynicism automatically points to mental health problems. The study shows a relationship between particular traits and ways of joking, but it does not explain where that relationship comes from. We therefore do not know whether the traits shape the humor, whether the humor shapes the traits, or whether both phenomena have a shared source.

Even light jokes can mean different things

Against this background, lighter styles of humor — fun, benevolent humor, nonsense, and wit — were usually less strongly linked with traits that may make relationships more difficult. They did not, however, automatically form a category of “healthy humor.”

People with a stronger tendency to avoid contact used these forms of joking less often. Fun and benevolent humor, meanwhile, appeared more often among people with a stronger inclination to attract attention, while wit appeared among people with a stronger need to emphasize their own worth. This shows that even apparently light jokes can have different sources and serve different functions.

The results, then, do not arrange themselves into a simple division between “good” and “bad” humor. The same kind of joke can form part of an affectionate game between people who are close, or it can become a way of gaining attention.

Sarcasm can hurt. Yet in a relationship where both people know each other’s boundaries and read intentions in a similar way, it can also become a shared code. The meaning of a joke therefore depends not only on words, but also on the situation, the relationship between people, and the way the other person receives it.

What lies behind different types of humor?

We cannot judge a person on the basis of 1 joke. A love of dark humor does not prove a “dark” personality, and a person who uses irony does not necessarily struggle with empathy. The way we joke also reflects culture, the workplace, a group of friends, life experience, and the specific situation.

The Italian study nevertheless allows us to look at humor less superficially. It is not merely an ornament of conversation, nor simply a measure of who can make a room laugh. Different types of humor can suggest how someone deals with tension and organizes relationships with others: whether they are trying to close the distance, or rather to keep it in place.

Read this article in Polish: Sarkazm, ironia, cynizm. Co mówi o nas sposób żartowania?