Why do we joke about killing ourselves? Suicide, stigma, and humor

Humor serves a variety of functions, and the current study seeks to understand the function of suicide-related humor. Through the creation of a novel suicide-humor scale, we measured participants’ usage of suicidal humor and general humor, their experience with suicidality, and their stigma towards suicide. Our hypotheses that greater experience with suicidality will predict an increase in one’s use of suicide-related humor and self-defeating humor were supported. However, stigma did not mediate this relationship as expected. Findings suggest that people who have experience with suicide are more likely to use suicidal humor, but more work is needed to determine why.