The more intelligent you are, the more you'll laugh at this

Apparently the smarter you are, the darker your humour.

Find this funny?

If your answer was yes (or if you at least appreciated the dark humour), then you're probably quite intelligent -(don't worry, the German words are irrelevant).

A new a study published in Cognitive Processing carried out by neurologists and psychologists at the University of Vienna, looked at 156 adults and found that people with a dark and sick sense of humour tend to be more intelligent and better educated.

The results also found that people who had a twisted humour were more emotionally stable and laid back!

The study asked participants to rate how funny they found a series of cartoons printed in The Black Book by German humourist Uli Stein (like the one above)!

They then participated in a series of tests of verbal and non-verbal intelligence, mood disturbance and aggressiveness and the results showed those with high comprehension and intelligence were the ones who most enjoyed the black humour in the cartoons.

One of the authors defines 'black humour' as: 

"a kind of humour that treats sinister subjects like death, disease, deformity, handicap or warfare with bitter amusement and presents such tragic, distressing or morbid topics in humorous terms."

Those who least enjoyed the cartoons were not necessarily the least intelligent, but those who were most aggressive.

The researchers concluded with 'these results support the hypothesis that humour processing involves cognitive as well as affective components and suggest that these variables influence the execution of frame-shifting and conceptual blending in the course of humour processing.'

Aaand if you didn't understand that last sentence, in our words it basically means the smarter you are, the deeper and more thoroughly you process 'funnies'.