Vulgarity and Hilarity: The Dark Tetrad and HEXACO as Predictors of Creating Aggressive, Obscene, and Otherwise Offensive Humor

When people try to be funny, what kind of humor do they create? The present research applied the Dark Tetrad and HEXACO models to understanding individual differences in the creation of vulgar humor, a broad category that includes material that is disparaging, obscene, hostile, taboo, or otherwise offensive. A sample of 530 adults completed the SD4 and HEXACO-100 along with an open-ended creative humor production task, and their humor responses were coded for toxic content using Detoxify, a BERT-based large language model that had been fine-tuned to detect offensive material in text. Structural equation models found that the creation of vulgar humor was significantly associated with being male, younger, and less educated. None of the six HEXACO traits significantly predicted vulgarity, but Dark Tetrad models found significant effects for sadism (more vulgarity), psychopathy (less vulgarity), and the global D factor (more vulgarity) in a bifactor model. Taken together, the findings shed light on who is more likely to use taboo comedic devices and to create jokes that violate norms of politeness.