Is Dark Humor a Sign We’ve Wandered Too Far From Our Natural State?

Existential musings for May 1st 2026.

Last night I went to the Ritz Carlton with some girlfriends, smoked shisha, had a whole night. Came home, couldn’t sleep. Found myself scrolling reels at 3am like a normal person, and one came up of a guy who asked his barber for a mullet. What he got was something medieval.

I laughed immediately and without apology and headed straight to the comments. The comments were outrageous and amazing and honestly kind of wholesome — people absolutely razzing this guy, but in that way where there’s a little love in it. Maybe he likes the haircut. lol.

But then my brain did what it does at 3am ( also 24/7) and I got existential about it. What is actually happening here? Why did hundreds of strangers show up to roast a haircut with this much collective creativity? And why does it feel like something genuinely human is going on even when the subject is completely trivial?

Which pulled me into a bigger question I’ve been turning over: is humor — especially dark humor — a signal that we’ve wandered pretty far from our natural state?

Here’s what I mean.

There’s a version of humor that feels ancient. Pranks, teasing, horseplay. The kind of thing you’d expect around a fire between people who know each other. It doesn’t require much — just proximity and a willingness to mess with each other. Primates do versions of it. It’s probably older than language.

Then there’s the kind that requires a setup. A shared cultural standard, an expectation — and then something that violates it in just the right way. That’s the mullet guy. That’s most of what lives on the internet. You laugh before you’ve even decided if you should. The humor mechanism and your moral reasoning are running on completely different tracks.

And then there’s dark humor. The stuff my friends and I thank God for regularly, because sometimes you genuinely cannot make real life up. Dark humor shows up when regular humor isn’t a strong enough tool anymore. It metabolizes harder material. The darkness is almost proportional to how far reality has deviated from anything simple or manageable. I know a lot of people with genuinely wild stories. Almost all of them are hilarious. Not a coincidence.

But here’s the part that actually gets me.

In 2020 the entire world locked down simultaneously. People lost jobs, lost family members, lost their minds a little. And what happened? A global meme era that might never be topped. The sourdough phase. “What day is it.” The guy with the coffee and the burning house. Millions of people across languages and cultures landing on the same jokes at the same time with zero coordination, zero budget, zero organizing committee. Just collective creative energy looking for somewhere to go.

And it wasn’t new. In 2010 Antoine Dodson gave a local news interview that the internet turned into a song within days. Then came the remixes. Hundreds of them. From everywhere. A spontaneous global creative project built around a news blooper, assembled by strangers who would never meet, for no reason except that it was funny and it felt good to be part of something.

And then — possibly the peak of the entire genre — Iran’s official media team released Lego videos with rap tracks roasting American delegates. A government. With a media budget. Chose Lego characters and rap music to enter the conversation. Respect the range honestly.

But here’s what gets me about all of it.

The world came together on Antoine Dodson remixes and quarantine memes with zero effort. Iran’s media team found common ground with internet culture faster than most actual diplomatic negotiations move. Hundreds of strangers built something together over a bad haircut.

But we can’t quite seem to get organized about where the food and drinking water are coming from.

That’s not just a funny observation. That’s the whole theory. Humans are extraordinarily capable of spontaneous coordination and collective creativity. We just seem to need the stakes to be completely meaningless to fully activate it. The moment it actually matters, something freezes.

So maybe meme culture and dark humor aren’t just entertainment. Maybe they’re where human coordination ability goes when it has nowhere useful to land. The capacity is clearly there, running in the background. We just keep deploying it on Farquaad haircuts.

I’m not a 9-to-5 person. My life doesn’t follow a schedule and I romanticize all of it — I do a lot of things for the plot. Which means I also have a lot of material. And I’ve learned that when life gets genuinely absurd, you either develop the tools to metabolize it or you don’t. Humor is one of the main ones.

Anyway. It’s 3am, the shisha has worn off, and I just wrote a theory about human civilization because a man got a bad haircut and the internet showed up for it.

We are very funny. We find each other over completely stupid things and we build something, even if it only lasts a news cycle.

Maybe that’s what humor has always been. Less about what’s funny, and more about who shows up to laugh.

Maybe that’s what humor has always been. Less about what’s funny, more about who shows up to laugh. And the best ones you just keep. You’re alone somewhere a week later and you think about that medieval mullet and you smile to yourself. And if you have a friend with you, you remind them and you laugh about it all over again