can I use dark humor at work?

by Alison Green on February 17, 2025

I’m off for the holiday, so here’s an older post from the archives. This was originally published in 2019.

A reader writes:

I have a dark sense of humor. I now realize that my boss does not. During a standard “how was your day off” conversation between my supervisor, manager, and a few peers, my manager mentioned that he was a chaperone for one of his kid’s field trips to Gatorland. Naturally, I asked if any of the kids on the trip got eaten by an alligator. When the response was no, I followed up with a “darn, you should get a refund” joke that everyone laughed at and then the conversation and the morning carried on.

Being the day after Mardi Gras, someone from our office brought in king cake, and our manager asked if anyone found the baby. The coworker who brought it in stated she didn’t hide the baby in the cake because of the chance of someone choking on it. I then followed up with a joke that using a piece of real baby would avoid this issue, provided it’s deboned. Most of my immediate work group found this hilarious, but my manager nervously laughed and had the most concerned look on his face. I then realized the timing of this joke was just a bit later in the morning following the previous joke, and now there’s a chance my boss thinks I’m a kid-cannibal.

My question is: Any tips for navigating humor in the office? Obviously everything was said and understood to be all in a joking manner, but I’m concerned he was a bit weirded out by it. While I’m sure it’s a fine line between what’s hilarious and what’s not okay in an office setting joke-wise, I’d appreciate any help (or even just any good stories) regarding this.

A good guideline at work is to stay away from jokes about harm coming to things that people around you are likely to hold dear — like kids and animals — or jokes that feel mean-spirited.

Dark humor at work is tricky. I don’t want to say “it’s best avoided” because I hate the idea of work stamping all individuality out of people, and often the ways that people deviate from the bland norm are what makes them interesting and likable. But the truth is … yeah, maybe it’s best avoided at work, or confined to really small quantities. (Tell one dark joke at work every few months, and you have an amusing sense of humor, provided it’s the right joke. Tell two in a single day, and you risk being the person who’s not reading the room and is making people uncomfortable.)

Another thing to keep in mind at work is that you don’t know what’s going on in people’s personal lives in the way that you would with close friends. If you make a macabre joke about a baby, you don’t know if you’re saying that to someone who might have lost a child or is dealing with other struggles that will make it land really differently than you intended.

And yes, some of the funniest humor is risky in some way. But you’re not really being asked to bring that kind of sharp edge to work, where your job is to get along with other people, not to entertain.

Dark humor can also drag a team’s mood down. It can be exhausting to hear a lot of it if that’s not your own style (and you’ve got to assume that in any work group, there’s going to be a mix of humor styles — so some people aren’t going to like it, and are going to find it cynical/off-putting/wearying).

None of this means that you have totally bland yourself down and only tell dad jokes from now on. But there’s a lot of room in between.

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{ 286 comments }

{ 286 comments… read them below or add one }

  1. A Book about Metals*

    I’d say it’s definitely a “know your audience” kind of thing. But as rule of thumb, no more than one dead baby joke per day from now on

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    1. KateM*

      I think “per day” is not a good measurement – better would be “no more than 1 of x jokes”. If OP makes only one joke per day, and that joke is a dead baby joke (so no more than one dead baby joke per day), they still only ever joke about dead babies.

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      1. Dread Pirate Roberts*

        I took that line (“one dead baby joke a day” as humour and found it hilarious so … yeah people have different senses of humour and not everyone will get every type. I agree with AAM on maybe staying away from dead/hurt baby or animal jokes altogether.

        Also I found the first of the OP’s jokes reasonably funny but if I’d heard both in one day it would be a “you’re trying way too hard to make ‘fetch’ happen” situation.

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        1. Observer*

          just another example of humor not always translating :)

          Very much.

          But also, when you are talking to someone whose sense of what is appropriate is so badly calibrated, it’s much more likely that they are going to take this too seriously. To the point that my first reaction when I read your comment was “It’s a good thing that the LW is probably not reading, because they’d probably take it seriously!”

          And, yes, their sense of appropriate is poorly calibrated. They responded to the original, and the sense I got from the letter was definitely confirmed. As another commenter at the time noted, this person is clearly not reading the room.

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          1. Quill*

            It also depends on what is normal in your workplace. Dark humor tends to go over a little more begnignly in situations where the joke is legitimately less dark than some of the stuff you see at work. For example, you work in an infectious disease lab, your go to bit might be “well, at least it’s not bubonic plague.” (It’s disgusting, but it’s not going to wipe out 1/3 of europe.)

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    2. Butterfly Counter*

      But as rule of thumb, no more than one dead baby joke per day from now on.

      I came to the comments to post the exact same thing!

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    3. LifebeforeCorona*

      My manager had 5 kids and they went on a vacation to Disney World. On his first day back I asked if they returned with the same number of kids. He thought it was hilarious because a big part of the trip was wrangling kids. By the same token there was a co-worker who would find the joke offensive. Know your audience.

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      1. BatManDan*

        And, well, there was that one toddler that got eaten by an alligator AT Disney World, so, there’s that. (Search it – it really happened.)

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            1. Also-ADHD*

              ARE Disney World, I mean (no park is called Disney World – it’s the totality of all the stuff on property, parks, shopping experience areas, resorts, etc.)

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      2. AnotherOne*

        I’d find that hilarious but partly because my sister got left at disney on a school trip.

        (the school was still blaming my sister for getting left there 4 years later when my class went on our first disney trip, when it was only like max 20% her fault. yes, my parents should have sued in retrospect, just so the school would have stopped blaming my sister for their administrators’ mistake.)

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        1. Lenora Rose*

          Also, I imagine, your sister was a minor in their charge. She could be the most impossible vanishing escape-prone child ever and it would STILL be their mistake.

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      3. Your Former Password Resetter*

        That joke is also about the enthusiastic chaos of small children and the comedy movie hijinks that might ensue from it. Which is less immediately disturbing than something awful happening to his kids.

        Also an audience of one that you’re already familiar with, and who has the standing to tell you off if you cross a line. Which definitely helps soften any potential impact.

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    4. anon for this*

      I’d put dead baby jokes in the same column as rape jokes — that is, just don’t, unless you’re amongst friends who you know will be ok with it, and I myself am NOT ever going to be one of those.

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      1. Emily Byrd Starr*

        Exactly. Sexist, racist, ethnic, and ableist jokes also fall into that category, that is: only tell them when you know that everyone in earshot is 100% okay with them. For some people, that means never.

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        1. AJ*

          And “Okay with them” in the context of humor means, “Feels safe hearing them from your mouth.” Because edgy jokes stop being funny when they stop having an undercurrent of safety. Which is why it’s usually best to save these kinds of jokes for friends who know your character very well and understand that you’re not really calling “Gender equality” a punchline.

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          1. Emily Byrd Starr*

            Eh, there are some “jokes” that wouldn’t necessarily make me feel like I’m in danger, but I nonetheless would find them offensive. For instance, anything with the R word is unacceptable to me.

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            1. AJ*

              By safety, I don’t mean specifically safe from HARM, but also safe from disrespect, from unkindness, from things you find personally upsetting. It’s a term I borrow from the very good book The Humor Code, as is the framework for understanding humor.

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      3. Rayray*

        I agree. I find a joke about eating a dead baby really disgusting and I can’t imagine too many settings where everyone in a large group would be okay with it.

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    5. Also-ADHD*

      The first joke (gatorland) made sense to me, and I was onboard. The deboned baby-in-a-cake joke was a little far for a general audience, IMO. It sort of put me off cake, and I’m not even very fond of babies / have no baby-related trauma + I often like dark humor. But that would have surprised me in a workplace setting, in the context given. And the 2 in one day definitely makes it seem like LW is way more into making jokes about hurt/dead kids than I imagine they are (probably happenstance that it was both in the one day).

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      1. SimonTheGreyWarden*

        This is where I stand. I could see me making a joke like the first one to the right audience. The second one….maybe with my friend group, which does tend to run a little darker, but even then it’s not a sure thing. Certainly never at work.

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    6. Artemesia*

      yeah — I have a dark sense of humor but it seems like infant cannibalism is probably always going to be a bridge too far.

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    7. Just say non*

      The alligator joke was okay. The baby cake joke was definitely not cool. If anyone chuckled at that one, I suspect it was in a very awkward “yikes, this is supposed to be a joke” way.

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  2. My Boss is Dumber than Yours*

    I’d much prefer dark humor to dirty humor personally, but I really think the biggest thing about work humor is not going after every possible joke in regular industry terms. I mean, I get it that “master fader” is low hanging fruit, but it’s also a perfectly common thing to talk about in my work and I get so tired of people who have to snicker at it. Every. Single. Time. It’s exhausting to work with people who will turn everything into jokes; double so when the jokes are sexually in nature.

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    1. Adam*

      There’s a manager at my work (not mine) that has a joking response to just about everything that’s posted at work. I both find it incredibly tiring and it makes me think of him as less capable as a result.

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      1. MSD*

        Same here. The manager was always making jokes and I also found it annoying. Unlike his, however, all of my jokes were of course hilarious and appreciated by everyone.

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      2. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

        I had a coworker who made a joke out of every. single. thing. and it was exhausting. Ask him to take out the garbage? Joke. Ask if he swept the floor? Joke. Ask if he could load something into a van? Joke. He had a rough home life and I think it was forced humor, but it made talking to him maddening. He was a nice guy but I wasn’t upset when he no longer worked there.

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      3. JustCuz*

        My thing is with the “work jokesters” is that inevitably they are going to slip and say something or do something that crosses a line. And in all likelihood continue to do that until stopped. Most, not all, but most of the office jokester I have run into use it as a way to push boundaries.

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    2. umami*

      This. My spouse is one of those people who can turn anything into a joke (and does), and I have to remind him that not everything needs to be a joke just because you thought of something funny or witty. It gets old REALLY FAST no matter the audience or their tolerance for a type of humor, you don’t want to be the person who makes jokes about everything.

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      1. AFac*

        One of the bad things about living on my own is that when I think of something funny or witty to say, I don’t have anyone to say it to.

        On the other hand, that has probably saved me many times from putting my foot in my mouth in front of other people.

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    3. Emily Byrd Starr*

      I don’t know what “master fader” is. I googled it and it seems to be some kind of technology, but I don’t see the joke. Unless you mean to jokingly say, “baiter” instead of “fader?” (Which I think is funny, but not really work appropriate).

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      1. Junior Dev*

        I think the joke is that it sounds sort of like “masturbator,” yes. And that if you work in an industry where the term “master fader” comes up often in the context of relevant work conversations, it gets really old to hear people constantly snicker or make double entendres every time this relevant phrase comes up.

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        2. Grizabella the Glamour Cat*

          Thanks, Junior Dev, and thanks, Emily Byrd Starr, for asking. I had the same question and was completely at a loss!

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    4. 2e asteroid*

      My techie but medical-adjacent job has a bajillion acronyms that have some possible alternate offensive meaning (e.g. FU for follow-up). I don’t think anyone’s ever commented on them; if they did, we’d never have time for anything else!

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      1. Poise 'n Pen*

        “I hate little notes on my pillow. “We’re out of cornflakes, FU”. Took me 3 hours to figure out FU was Felix Unger”. Sorry, my brain doesn’t think FU is “follow up”.

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        1. Nightengale*

          I had a teacher in high school who wrote SOS on my science notebook

          I had to ask her why she was calling for help all over my notebook, had I made that many errors? What was wrong?

          S.O.S. were her initials, she had just basically been initialing that she had seen what I wrote and was OK with it. Yes I could have told you those were her initials if asked, but mostly we called her Dr. O. Definitely not the first thing I think of when seeing SOS.

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      2. Teach*

        In most schools, students still have “cumulative files” of some variety. Spoken, we call them a shortened thing that sounds like “kyooom” files. Don’t abbreviate that in an email, though.

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        1. Lenora Rose*

          School-related clerical admin here. I get emails about cumulative files (abbreviated) all the time, and don’t bat an eye. What I *wouldn’t* do is send any such email to anyone who wasn’t an education related clerk …

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    5. allathian*

      POS made me giggle as a teen working retail. Our point-of-sale terminals had two-line displays and ran some flavor of Unix, and the line “POS #…. Ready” that greeted you as you booted up/logged in was funny.

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  4. No Tribble At All*

    I remember this column. I remember reading it as sarcastic fresh-out and being like huh okay. I’m reading it now as a mom of a toddler. If you made that king cake joke at me I’d probably throw up. Or at least I’d have intrusive thoughts for days. I would go out of my way to avoid someone who made a joke like that — not because I actually think you’re a cannibal, but because you put horrible images into my head. I’d avoid you the same way I’d avoid someone who… idk, decided to bring up war crimes in casual conversation.

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      1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

        Likewise as well. I have a hard time getting things out of my head, so I just take care with what I do let into it.

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      2. Corrupted User Name*

        Same here – I’m very open about being childfree and happy about that, but I’d still be grossed out and disturbed by anyone talking about eating babies, and especially with reference to de-boning! That just evokes images no one wants or needs and I’m still questioning why the OP thought that was a good idea in ANY context!

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        1. Chas*

          Yes, I’m happily childfree and an omnivore, but I’m wishing I hadn’t read that part of the letter because just the thought of biting into a cake and finding meat inside if making me feel gross, even without the whole “dead baby” aspect of it. I certainly wouldn’t want to spend time with OP if they made that sort of comment on a regular basis.

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        2. umami*

          Yeah, I don’t even see it as dark humor, because it is completely missing any kind of humor. I hope OP has seriously cut back on their need to make what they think are funny comments to everything.

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        3. Annie E. Mouse*

          This! I have a really hard time believing that all of OP’s coworkers thought that joke was hilarious. It’s so graphic that the majority of people would not find it funny.

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          1. Observer*

            I have a really hard time believing that all of OP’s coworkers thought that joke was hilarious.

            Yeah. And I think it is highly possible that they really did not think it was so hilarious. Nervous laughter is something that happens, and I would be surprised if the LW would recognize that.

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    2. Falling Diphthong*

      Yeah, OP, I would frame this not as “The risk is people will think I’m being literal” but “The risk is people will cringe at the dark images I give them, and so will avoid me.”

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    3. Generic Name*

      It’s funny how becoming a parent really changes your perspective on things. I used to watch Law and Order: SVU a lot, but I couldn’t bring myself to watch a single episode after my child was born. It was too upsetting.

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      1. LifebeforeCorona*

        Me too, when my kid went away to school, I stopped watching especially the university student is missing episodes.

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      2. knitted feet*

        Yeah I found this too, and I’ve heard a lot of new parents say the same. I think some kind of adaptive thing kicks in when you suddenly have to care for a child – your empathy for specific things gets dialled allll the way up, even when you know full well it’s fiction. My youngest is 10 now and I’m not quite as sensitive as I was, but I still can’t watch any crime show episode where the victim is a child.

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        2. Double A*

          Your brain literally rewires after having a kid! I’m sure it’s a threat sensitivity thing. It seems to fade a bit as they get older, but the first time I mowed the grass after I had my first baby I felt so sorry that I was hurting the grass that was just doing its best to grow and probably killing some bugs and insects in the process. My husband and I tried to watch Criminal Minds and like half the shows are about kids getting killed! We could not.

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          1. knitted feet*

            Yeah exactly, and it really makes sense to me – you’re in charge of a completely helpless creature, you suddenly have to be on the lookout for a whole new set of risks, there are no real breaks and you have to be motivated to stay alert even when you’re torturously sleep deprived, so your brain REALLY hammers it home. And yes, I like Criminal Minds but have only seen about half the episodes for that same exact reason!

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          2. Grizabella the Glamour Cat*

            I wasn’t into watching crime shows when my daughter was born, but I’ll never forget the time I read a newspaper column that described the death of a child the same age as mine at the hsnd of abusive parents in extremely (and completely unnecessarily imo) graphic terms. I had never been so completely freaked the fuck out in my life before that. The story haunted me for weeks, and thinking about it still give⁹ls me the creeps.

            Being a parent definitely makes a difference in how one reacts to certain things!

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            1. Sensitive mom*

              OMG I remember I used to get these suggested articles from Google (based on recent searches or things I previously read online?). When my kid was a toddler Google realized I was interested in the topic “Toddler” and I had a nonstop stream of terrible articles about bad things happening to toddlers. Some of those scenarios really stuck in my head. I was really sensitive to the idea of anything happening to a young child at the time (still am, but I’m not thinking about it all the time now).

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        3. Your Former Password Resetter*

          I’m not a parent, but I did find my empathy go up as I went through my 20’s.
          I got much worse with any sort of violence as a result. Those background extra’s had loved ones too!

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          1. But what to call me?*

            I always end up empathizing with the background extras from stories at least as much as with the protagonist. They’re the protagonist of their own story too! And theirs just turned into a tragedy.

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          2. knitted feet*

            Yes, I do think this is probably part of the brain maturation that is still going on through the first half of your twenties, too.

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            1. Lenora Rose*

              As a side note, the study you’re referencing didn’t actually say the brain stops developing at 25. The study stopped at age 25. Evidence from other studies says your brain keeps developing until at least 30 – and can rewire itself at later ages still to some degree (eg recovery from trauma or injury, new education opportunity, new job), just at a slower rate and with more effort.

              Yes, people in their early 20s are more mature than teens, and people in their later 20s are more mature than early 20s (and so on), but it’s general maturity, not some special switch that gets flipped at 25.

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          3. RC*

            Not a parent and not in my 20s, but same over the past decade. I think the combination of the Fascist 1.0 and 2.0 plus pandemic just kind of… broke me? Specifically, I LOVED Breaking Bad when it first came out and recognize Vince Gilligan’s genius etc, but now I know I can’t manage a rewatch (and couldn’t get into BCS either).

            I’m probably missing out on other prestige TV but more empathy and needing hope in my fiction probably isn’t the worst thing.

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    4. Delta*

      I’m not a parent, but I also found the king cake joke in really poor taste and would be weirded out of somebody said that in an office. Glad I’m not the only one put off by it.

      On the other hand, I thought the kids being eaten by crocodile joke was fine. Kids being eaten by crocodiles feels very cartoon-y, but deboning a baby and baking it into a cake feels more like body horror.

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      1. amoeba*

        Yeah, this. Those two jokes are not at all at the same level. I don’t generally have a problem with dark humour, but the baby joke is also… just not that funny? It reads to me as somebody going out of their way to somehow insert something really off-putting into the conversation.

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      2. A Book about Metals*

        I guess I see them as pretty much the same. “Fee Fi Fo Fum” has been talking about grinding bones and eating them for hundreds of years. Either way though I’d still think twice before making these jokes at work

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        1. AJ*

          That’s a young man with agency, though, not a helpless innocent. That makes a difference in a lot of people’s internal scales. Just like how a sexist joke against men will land easier because men hold more power and picking on them is less likely to resonate with actual threats against them.

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      4. Scholarly Publisher*

        When I saw the picture book by Sylviane Donnio, I Really Want to Eat a Child, I thought it was hilarious and bought it for my kids, who thoroughly enjoyed it. But it’s funny because it’s an unusual point of view and because of the twist at the end (spoiler alert: no children are eaten in this book), and the concept is cartoony rather than lovingly detailed.

        See also Jon Klassen’s I Want My Hat Back, which would be horrifying if the climactic bit happened on page, but is funny because it’s only summarized in a throwaway sentence.

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        1. Elephant*

          Oh man, This Is Not My Hat is hilarious. My oldest did not understand what happens at the end for so long. He just kept smiling and laughing and saying “hat back!”

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      5. Hydrates all the flasks*

        Not a parent but was also very grossed out by the second “joke.”

        The first one wasn’t my cup of tea either and it made me immediately think of the toddler that was killed by an alligator at Disney World, of all places, in front of his family. Gatorland the amusement park is also located in Orlando, FL and the original letter was published only a few years after the Disney World incident. It’s not like the OP wouldn’t have been familiar with that incident, especially in Florida (it made global news at one point).

        So overall…why the need to go there* for either joke? Especially when the second one wasn’t even really a joke but more like an excuse to introduce body horror into the workplace?

        *there being dead kids (and in the case of the first example, kids dying in front of their parents)

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        1. Delta*

          I didn’t know a kid got eaten by a gator at Disney World. I live in the Northeast so I am not used to seeing crocodiles- but if a local kid had just been eaten by one I absolutely would not be joking about it with coworkers!

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      6. Teach*

        The toddler who was lost to a gator attack on Disney property (and I assume was consumed) was from my area. No one would ever make that joke around here.

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        1. Delta*

          Yeah, that’s a good point. I’m from the northeast so crocodiles are very much not a common thing to see outside of cartoons. If I lived in Florida I’d probably be freaked out by that one too

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          1. Lenora Rose*

            Alligators, not crocodiles.

            My husband is the one who knows someone who was eaten by a crocodile, and it happened in Kenya.

            (And it was a tragedy, but a tragedy of the insane stupidity of a missionary pretty much forcing his teenage son into a deadly situation, not of a toddler).

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      7. Observer*

        Kids being eaten by crocodiles feels very cartoon-y,

        Not when an actual incident of a child being actually killed by an alligator has been in the news fairly recently. At least not for most parents, people who work a lot with kids, and people who have close relationships with kids in their lives. And when that letter was posted, it was not *that* long after such an incident was all over the news.

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      8. Annie*

        yes, somehow they are on different levels to me. TBH it probably wouldn’t bother me in the moment, because the baby in the cake was always strange to me anyway so I’ve probably thought about that in a dark humor way before. But just reading these today and the specificity of the baby in the cake is too much.
        The baby being eaten by a crocodile is just a random joke without a lot of thought put into it, so is funny.

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    5. Lemons*

      Yeah that joke was way over a lot of people’s lines. There’s dark humor, and there’s being an edgelord. LW’s example fell squarely in the latter for me, and I’m skeptical that their coworkers really found it hilarious.

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      1. Falling Diphthong*

        Uncomfortable laughter is a thing. That people laughed doesn’t have to mean “ergo they found it funny.”

        Uncomfortable laughter can be deployed to try to ratchet down rising social awkwardness (ha ha that was a joke, we are all just joking here), or as a shocked reaction. Both of these instinctively or deliberately.

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        1. Arrietty*

          I once laughed when I saw a child running to his parents with his face covered in blood (he had banged his head and head wounds bleed profusely). I didn’t find it remotely amusing, it was just the shock of how bizarre it was to see.

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          1. Irish Teacher.*

            Yes, I once laughed when somebody collapsed in church and the priest asked “is there a doctor in the church? Or a nurse or anything?” It was partly the cliché but mostly just a shock reaction. I certainly didn’t find an elderly man possibly having a heart attack or a stroke (I don’t know what caused him to collapse) funny.

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      2. N=1*

        I’m a mother of two and a vegan, plus I work with children, but I found both jokes funny.

        Further evidence that unless you know your audience extremely well, it’s hard to guess how a joke is going to land—and thus it’s better to generally keep it light at work.

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    6. el l*

      You can get dark with humor. But not often*, and above all, you best not reach to go there.

      It’s illustrated by the first one being fine, the king cake one no. For me the difference between them is that the first one is so off the cuff, and ends up in a pretty vague place. I mean, who hasn’t looked at a gator and thought about them snapping.

      But for the second one, OP was really working hard to create a specific mental image. I mean, ooof, “Deboned baby”? You don’t have to be especially sensitive or a parent to have a creepy moment and wonder about who’s telling it.
      * Unless you say work as a medical examiner, where it’s arguably a decent coping mechanism for a psychologically-demanding job.

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    7. Jackalope*

      Similarly, I have a coworker who has previously had the same kind of pet as me, but no longer does because her previous pets died in gruesome ways. She has felt the need on more than one occasion to tell me in graphic detail exactly how they died, what it felt like finding their bodies, etc. I honestly don’t think she was doing this on purpose; I think my stories about my critters just brought the stories to mind and she doesn’t have a great filter (this based on other conversations I’ve heard from her, say in the lunch room and such). But I just couldn’t handle it, and still cringe thinking about it. So now I’m still polite to her but do my best to avoid any conversation that I can get out of just in case. OP, you don’t want to have your coworkers cringe whenever they think of you and your jokes.

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    8. aebhel*

      Yeah, I find the superior dismissive ‘oh, they don’t understand humor, they think I’m really doing these things’ attitude almost as grating as the joke itself, tbh. Like, I get that it’s a joke. I don’t think anyone’s going around eating babies here. It’s just gross and off-putting, and eagerly jumping to make jokes about killing children at every possible opportunity is going to come off as callous and clueless, at best. Especially at work, when you don’t know people’s histories or senses of humor, and they can’t easily avoid interacting with you.

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  5. KHB*

    There’s a difference between a joke that just happens to have a dark theme, but derives its humor from something else (like a twist on expectations), and a “joke” whose “punchline” is that cruelty to kids/animals/women/whatever is somehow inherently funny. Jokes in the first category (including the Gatorland joke) can be OK at work, in moderation, if you know your audience and know that they’ll be well received. “Jokes” in the second category (including the king cake joke) are best avoided entirely at work, and probably everywhere else too.

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    1. Alan*

      Yeah, I’m trying to characterize good “dark humor” vs bad “dark humor” and yours is as good a description as any I can come up with. I have a dark, cynical sense of humor. I know it doesn’t go over well with everyone, especially older people at work. It comes out sometimes when I’m really stressed. That said, children getting eaten by animals? Deboned babies? Please.

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    2. HB*

      This. I was fine with the Gatorland joke, but not the King Cake joke. Part of that is because mentally I have to do more work to make that joke “fit”* which means it’s not really a great joke to begin with, and the mental work makes the joke even *worse* because it’s both unpleasant, and shifts the point of the joke to something really disturbing.

      I wouldn’t necessarily assume that the person telling the joke is being deeply unpleasant on purpose, rather that it’s basically a reflex (this theme was funny last time, so I’m going to hit it again) and they aren’t really thinking about it beyond the potential gratification of saying something funny/clever. Plenty of people react/speak without fully thinking it through, but certain subjects/themes/etc require a higher duty of care.

      *Because having a piece of a baby doesn’t really reduce any choking risk. And a piece the same size of the plastic baby wouldn’t be large enough to have bone in it making the deboning part of the joke superfluous and therefore super weird. Like the point of the joke is to talk about deboning babies.

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      1. Michigander*

        Yes, agreed. The first joke felt okay, the second felt too far. Dead baby jokes do also have a very “I’m sooooo edgy” feel to them while not actually being funny.

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    3. Butterfly Counter*

      Exactly.

      The king cake joke just felt like too much. “Yes, you’re SO EDGY. Dead babies. Lol. Only a real comedian would go so far.”

      No.

      It might work as a comedy routine with enough build up. But you’re at work. Let it just be an intrusive thought and let it go.

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      1. KHB*

        Right, in a comedy routine – where everyone is there willingly, presumably knowing that they’re there to see a comedian whose schtick is offensive humor and openly joking about themes that are taboo in the rest of society – that kind of “offensiveness for the sake of offensiveness” humor could fly.

        Anywhere else, just no.

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      2. RVA Cat*

        This. The gross level of detail kills the humor. It’s not quite the Intern’s Infamous 9/11 Joke but it has similar body horror.

        Reply ↓
    4. toolegittoresign*

      it’s the difference between cartoonish and ghoulish imagery in the joke. “did the alligator eat anyone?” cartoonish and absurd. “a piece of baby… deboned” ghoulish due to specificity alone. Think to yourself “would you see this in a kids cartoon?” and if the answer is “yes” you can get away with it.

      I think both are funny, personally, but at work I would probably bite my cheek so I didn’t laugh at the latter because I’d think it was likely someone was going to be grossed out by it and wouldn’t want to normalize that joke. I enjoy a morbid joke but I don’t make them in the workplace and usually reserve it for close friends who I know share the appreciation. They can really REALLY upset people. And, believe me, you do NOT want to be in a situation where you make a joke like that and then someone says “That’s not funny. My [blank] died and I think it’s horrible to joke about.”

      Reply ↓
  6. Happy meal with extra happy*

    I see the first one as more of a corny dad joke than super dark, but the second one is “yikes” to me. It’s way too gory.

    Reply ↓
    1. RIP Pillowfort*

      That’s really kind of the problem. The first one isn’t a big deal to me and I say that as someone that does need to legitimately worry about gators on job sites sometimes.

      Even the second I would have probably said I wouldn’t trust a Jonathan Swift king cake to taste good without delicious microplastics. I wouldn’t have taken it seriously.

      It’s hard to know what flies and what doesn’t. I personally just choose not to show my dark humor at work because that’s going to create a better work environment. I keep it light at work with jokes and people seem happy with that.

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    2. Ess Ess*

      That was my reaction too. The first one was a standard humor joke, but the second one was a graphic description of dismemberment of a baby which was very off-putting. And added to that disturbing visual is saying while people are eating as well.

      Reply ↓
    3. Hell in a Handbasket*

      Yes – it’s odd to me that OP considers them on the same level. I don’t think the combo of the two is the issue — I think most people would be fine with the first one (though I don’t consider it particularly dark either, nor particularly original or hilarious), but many, many people would be hugely put off by the second one, regardless of whether they had heard the first. I have what I would consider a somewhat dark sense of humor, and I would not find it funny or appropriate in almost any context, and certainly not at work.

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    4. knitted feet*

      Yeah, the first joke is the kind of thing we say to our actual kids all the time. ‘What’s for dinner?’ ‘Ooh I don’t know, do you think we’ve fattened the kids up enough to go in the pot?’ This is not because we’re darkly hilarious, it’s because we’re middle-aged parents and making your kids cringe is the whole point.

      The second one is visceral enough to genuinely upset anyone who’s sensitive to that sort of thing. And some people have had really awful experiences and losses. Don’t bring that shit to work.

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    5. Annie*

      The first one I’d almost be tempted to say, “yes, it was horrible and I’d rather not talk about it.”
      The second one just is too much detail and is just not funny at all.

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    6. aebhel*

      I mean, mostly the second one isn’t actually a joke at all. It’s just a random gruesome fiction about something that people are currently eating – the only humor is derived from making people grossed out and uncomfortable.

      Reply ↓
    1. Kay*

      No, they aren’t. Most are repetitive and only funny the first time. Plus, puns aren’t really my thing. I’m fine with dad jokes every once in a while, but too many jokers have no idea when to stop. Me saying “that was corny” is not an invitation to go on a veggie joke tangent!

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        1. Not always funny*

          I agree with Kay and this answer proves their point. Somebody puts a soft disagreement to the discussion – but person doing the joking is so convinced of themself that they go on nonetheless. And then it’s not only about the jokes, but one person staring to feel resentful towards the other person because they feel their boundaries are being ignored.

          People at work will politely laugh out of several reasons, even if they disagree with the jokes or are annoyed. They might be conflict-avoidant, they might hope that the awkwardness of a missed punchline will go over quicker if they ignore the joke, they are too polite to call out a bad joke, the person telling the joke might be in a position of power, and so on.

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      2. Yankees fans are awesome!*

        But some people, like SometimesMaybe, find dad jokes funny, deem them as such, and that’s okay. Really.

        Reply ↓
      4. Emily Byrd Starr*

        Not me. Puns are totally my thing! Even though you may not carrot all for vegetable puns, I don’t see what the big dill is.

        (Sorry! I couldn’t resist!!!!!)

        Reply ↓
          1. Emily Byrd Starr*

            Don’t you know? You should never tell anyone, especially on the internet, that you hate puns, because they will see that as an opportunity to make puns just to mess with you. :)
            Seriously, though, AthenaC and Jackalope said in their comments below, puns are harmless, inoffensive, and unthreatening to everyone. They may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but they’re not going to cause anyone to be grossed out or feel uncomfortable.
            I have no patience for people who tell racist, sexist, homophobic, or ableist jokes and then when people are offended, say, “Oh, come on, learn to take a joke and stop being so sensitive!” I always say, “I’ll stop being so sensitive when you quit being so INsensitive.”
            But come on, puns are harmless. People can handle them, even if they don’t find them funny. It’s like the difference between giving Coke to someone who prefers Pepsi, versus someone who can’t drink Coke for religious reasons.
            (Now, if I were told by my supervisor to stop making puns at work because he sees it as unprofessional, I would comply. But online? I love wordplay and I will never apologize for making puns.)

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      5. AthenaC*

        Perhaps not, but dad jokes at least have the benefit of being inoffensive. Annoying to some people? Sure. Likely to cause horrible intrusive thoughts in the listeners? No.

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        1. Jackalope*

          Yeah, this is part of it. Someone who doesn’t like dad jokes is more likely to just roll their eyes and move on; someone who is skeeved out by body horror is potentially going to be seriously disturbed by the Kong Cake joke.

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    2. Generic Name*

      I happen to love dad jokes, but this illustrates just how individual senses of humor are. I would reiterate Alison’s point that your employer isn’t asking you to bring your sharpest/best jokes/wordplay to the office. I’m not saying you can never laugh or you can never have fun, but I’ve experienced workplaces where the higher ups seemed to treat employees attending companywide meetings as their personal audience for their amateur standup routines. Everyone laughed politely/uncomfortably, but the real downside was it set up for an unprofessional environment where certain employees felt it was their right to tell inappropriate jokes at work.

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      1. SometimesMaybe*

        arrgh, *too seriously. Its hard to make any king of argument when the autocorrect on my phone thinks it smarter than me.

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      2. AJ*

        To be fair, this is a thread where everyone is in the mindset to seriously consider how humor works and why different kinds of humor affect people differently. It’s a pretty serious discussion already, so I’m not surprised your off-the-cuff joke didn’t land.

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  8. ChiTownSalaryman*

    There are many more people in the world than I have met, but…

    I have yet to meet someone who describes their humor as “dark” or “gives as good as they get” who was not really understating how uncomfortable their choices were making others, all of the time.

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    1. Sisi*

      +1. If someone says they love “dark humor”, I immediately flag it in my head as a yellow flag. I love a good “dark” joke every now and then, but I wouldn’t describe my humor as dark. I can read a room.

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      1. A Book about Metals*

        Many of the commenters here are saying they love dark humor, just not at work. I think that’s reasonable and not a flag of any color

        Reply ↓
        1. Emily Byrd Starr*

          Understandable. Nothing makes me laugh harder than jokes about genitalia and butts, but I understand that such jokes are not appropriate for work.

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      2. Alan*

        It’s like dark chocolate. I like dark chocolate, or I thought I did, until someone handed me something 95 % cacao and I could barely get it down. If your dark humor is 95 % dark/gory and 5 % humor, yeah, I’m not gonna like it and the fact that you’re so proud of it doesn’t say great things about you.

        Reply ↓
        1. HonorBox*

          Great example. Yes.

          There are comedians who lean more toward dark humor, but even they know that the 95% is going to be a deal breaker for most audience members.

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          1. Charlotte Lucas*

            Most of my professional life, I have worked with nurses. As a group, they have seen and heard everything, and they often have pretty dark senses of humor. But they are very careful about unleashing it on the unsuspecting.

            On the other hand, nurses are some of the smartest, funniest people I’ve ever worked with.

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      3. amoeba*

        I mean, there’s dark and “dark” as in “oh, I’m so edgy! (and probably insulting to some minority)”. Definitely down for the first one (Dylan Moran, anybody?), but the second one’s a no.

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    2. CzechMate*

      See, I also have a pretty offbeat sense of humor, but I definitely DON’T bring it to work and it only comes out when I’m talking 1:1 to someone I know pretty well. And, yes, as others have said, it’s because in the workplace I’m supposed to help create a safe space for my colleagues and recognize that they may not want to hear me muttering about something that they might find distressing. It’s the same reason I don’t swear or discuss religion at work.

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    3. SnookidyBoo*

      ‘dark humor’ to me is along the lines of sarcasm – it’s really just cruelty and hostility dressed up as ‘funny’ and ‘it’s just a joke, don’t be so sensitive!’. To me it means you are someone to avoid.

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      1. Generic Name*

        I agree! So many people seem to make “being sarcastic” or “having a dark sense of humor” their whole personality, and I just find it offputting. When I was online dating, I always swiped left on dudes who said “fluent in sarcasm” in their profiles. I guess it’s cool if your friends like this type of humor, but don’t subject these jokes to the unwilling and captive audience of your coworkers.

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        1. Jojo*

          This. I tend towards sarcasm, but I am aware that it can just come across as mean. I try to limit my targets to myself and things, and not other people. By things, I mean processes or other systems in my company that we are all frustrated with. Or weather, or traffic. That kind of thing. (Sarcasm was my defense against being bullied, but I’m not being bullied anymore, so it doesn’t really have a purpose anymore. I’m trying to let the worst of it go.)

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      2. ChiTownSalaryman*

        Yeah – jokes that don’t land are just statements. Inappropriate jokes that don’t land are just inappropriate statements. And if people aren’t as funny as they think, and they like inappropriate jokes – they have to be prepared for the rest of the world to think of them as someone who makes a lot of inappropriate statements.

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    4. learnedthehardway*

      Agreed. It feels like the intent is not just to amuse but to shock and make people uncomfortable. If that’s your purpose, save it for your friends. They can more easily decide whether they want to keep company with you.

      Reply ↓
      1. Elbe*

        This is a great point. The reason why being yourself is encouraged in your personal life, but meeting professional norms at work is generally valued over 100% authenticity is because people have more control within their personal lives.

        Anyone who needs a paycheck to live is somewhat captive at work, and it’s important that everyone respect that.

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    5. LSM*

      I also think some of this is how you define “dark humor.” For me, I have described myself as having a “dark sense of humor”, but what I mean by that is, I’m the kind of person who will make jokes about my horribly abusive and messed up parents. (but not at work! Only with certain friends! Dark humor definitely requires knowing your audience)

      So when I say “dark humor”, I guess what I mean is that one of my coping mechanisms is finding humor in the really bleak, messed up parts of my life, because it’s either that, or just go around crying all the time.

      But that’s not the kind of sense of humor I bring to work. And also, neither of these jokes from OP seemed remotely funny to me, and the dead baby in the king cake joke was super disturbing (I wish I hadn’t been eating lunch while I read it). I have no kids and never will – I can’t imagine how upsetting this would be for any parents.

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      1. wavefunction*

        I agree strongly that a lot of this is up to the broad possible definitions of “dark humor”. I used to describe my sense of humor as dark because I enjoy joking about death and my own trauma, and was fairly horrified to learn some people only associated dark humor with racist/sexist jokes.

        (A lot of my dark humor was formed in inpatient mental health treatment, but the jokes traumatized teenagers make are not appropriate for work. Sometimes I think of a funny joke that’s not appropriate for my current audience and just think “man, that joke would have killed in rehab”.)

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        1. AthenaC*

          I find humor in my first abusive marriage, partly because I’m in a different place in life and those events have no power over me anymore.

          But it’s also impossible to joke about with most people because it just comes across as WAY too much! So I save it for my husband, family, and close friends.

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      2. Observer*

        but what I mean by that is, I’m the kind of person who will make jokes about my horribly abusive and messed up parents.

        This is the kind of thing I would probably use the term “gallows humor” for.

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      3. aebhel*

        Yeah – it’s also a matter of how you approach the concept. I love black comedy, but people making a big show of how edgy and dark their sense of humor is, especially in the face of someone’s obvious discomfort, are just childish.

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    6. Silver Robin*

      This has me thinking about how the content of the work really matters. Lots of people whose jobs involve emotionally taxing work use dark humor as a coping mechanism. But that is finding ways to laugh in a dark situation, and even they have limits.

      For folks whose work does not have that context, it feels like they are bringing the darkness into a place that was otherwise light and it brings the mood down.

      A kid getting eaten by an alligator was absurd enough to probably not happen but also having a bunch of kids in any situation is chaotic and near alligators is extra stressful because of that risk, so the joke makes sense for the context. It allows someone to say “oh my god but actually one kid was constantly running from the group and I swear…” It can be an escape valve for parental stress.

      The dead baby joke…the baby Jesus is a silly and ultimately sweet tradition; why weigh it down with something so horrifying? I know Christians have a thing about transubstantiation thing but good lord, you are not supposed to actually go for cannibalism… (see, that was a joke).

      And I say this as a person who has told jokes about Jews using Christian baby blood for matzah (the original blood libel) but not at WORK; and those are jokes at the expense of the conspiracy, not the babies. Even if I worked at a Jewish org, I would have to be incredibly close and comfortable with my coworkers to tell one.

      Anyway, a lot of rambling to say, “context, people!”

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      1. But what to call me?*

        That Christian baby blood one is a big illustration of the importance of context, because the listener needs to be both sufficiently familiar with anti-Jewish conspiracy theories for that connection to come immediately to mind and sufficiently familiar with the joke teller to be sure they’re making fun of the conspiracy rather than supporting it. And that’s assuming the listener is in a good state of mind to be amused by it rather than ‘why did you have to make me think about that right now?’ So yes, context!

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      2. Observer*

        A kid getting eaten by an alligator was absurd enough to probably not happen but also having a bunch of kids in any situation is chaotic and near alligators is extra stressful because of that risk, so the joke makes sense for the context

        Except that it actually *did* happen. If I recall correctly about a year before this letter originally came in. So relatively fresh in people’s minds as it was all over the news at the time.

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      3. velveteen rabbit*

        Children absolutely can be and are killed and eaten by wild predators though. It’s horrifying on a visceral level and I’d say that jokes about an alligator eating a child are about as funny as the dingo ate my baby jokes that were seen as “hilarious” 80s are.

        Which is to say they’re not.

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    7. Also-ADHD*

      I would describe my humor as dark.

      I still would reign in any “dark jokes” (and I don’t make oodles of jokes) in a workplace and I’m not an asshole, so I’m fairly sure I come across as bland. My current boss actually said, “Oh, so do you like humor” the first time I made a joke – several months in – and mentioned a comic special I enjoyed as the conversation went on – this was on a trip, so a less formal event, and one of the first times we’d met in person. (And it was a well received joke, but what made it extra funny to people was I’m usually fairly serious / direct / focused at work and come across as fairly “safe, bland, Midwestern librarian-looking lady” but the joke was a wee bit dark and fairly witty, albeit not gross/harmful in any way.)

      I would say many friends I know have dark senses of humor and will say so, but they’ll say so not as a defense but as a “I’m not sure you’d like this – it’s a bit dark” self-awareness. I wouldn’t say the issue is a dark sense of humor so much as a lack of self-awareness that others think differently than you AND aren’t always overtly sharing when they’re uncomfortable either.

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      1. But what to call me?*

        That reminds me of the time in high school when I swore (fairly mildly) in front of my aunt (who swore whenever she felt like it) and she was shocked. It had never occurred to her that I swore! Apparently I’d accidentally managed to present myself as much more of a goodie two shoes than I actually was. Similar things have happened a few other times in my life, much to the amusement of people who know me better.

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  9. Alicent*

    I love some dark humor and my coworkers definitely cope with our job by using it, but dead baby jokes tend to fall flat at work, especially when you’re talking about eating them. I would keep any jokes really PG going forward before you get the reputation of “that person.”

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    1. Falling Diphthong*

      I think this is a good point: You are aware that your rep seems to have slipped from “Person into crepes” to “Person so into crepes they make those around them uncomfortable.” In which case you over correct for a bit to indicate that you can, indeed, pick up on cues and recognize that the crepe references had gotten a bit out of hand and will be toning it down.

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  10. Ralph the Wonder Llama*

    As someone who enjoys a dark sense of humor, I’ve come to the conclusion that showing it at work will likely lead to being labeled a negative person at best, or “off” at worst. Which of course negatively affects work, work opportunities, and work relationships. Notice how the positive, bubbly charmers get ahead at work? I choose to fake it at work and save the dark humor for my friends and my brother, all of whom enjoy the same.

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    1. Everything Bagel*

      Is it really faking it, or just rather reigning it in? That’s the way I look at it. Save the dark stuff for people who will understand and appreciate it from you. You can still be yourself at work without going there.

      Reply ↓
    2. Arrietty*

      It might be something to do with the fact that the positive, bubbly charmers aren’t making people think about unpleasant, uncomfortable topics at work.

      Reply ↓
  11. Irish Teacher.*

    I doubt your boss thinks you’re a baby cannibal. It’s far more likely they just think your joke wasn’t funny and/or was really inappropriate.

    I think this is very much a know-your-audience thing and not just in the context of work. Those are the kind of jokes, particularly the second one, that’s it’s better to make only to people who you know enjoy that sort of humour. Some people will be uncomfortable with it and really, jokes are for the people they are made to. Presumably, you make jokes so people will enjoy them and don’t want to make people uncomfortable.

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  12. bamcheeks*

    Oof. I feel like this kind of edgelord “ooh, I have such a ~~dark~~ sense of humour! get me! I never got over being fifteen!” thing really had a moment in the late 00s, and honestly, I’m kind of surprised this letter was published in 2019. Of all the possible ways that people signal “I’m not down with the corporate norms, I’m a ~~cool co-worker~~”, this feels like the most tedious.

    like– just put some stickers on your laptop.

    Reply ↓
    1. Corrupted User Name*

      “Just put some stickers on your laptop” is going to become my new response to anything with the whiff of edgelord-ness, thank you!

      Reply ↓
      1. Madre del becchino*

        Wait — does having stickers on my laptop (one says “spread joy” and the other is from our county soil and water conservation district) make me an edgelord? Who would have guessed? ;)

        Reply ↓
        2. bamcheeks*

          no, I am pro-laptop stickers! I think they are a positive way to demonstrate that you aren’t 100% corporate workperson, unlike making “dark humour” jokes!

          Reply ↓
            1. BlueHudson*

              “Not all laptop stickers” is one of the rare actually funny things I’ve read here. If this seems “mean”, the Internet may not be a healthy place for you.

              Reply ↓
  13. UKAAM*

    The alligator one and the king cake one are pretty different imo. The first one was a bit sarcastic and outlandish – the likelihood of an alligator eating a kid is low, but the very specific image about deboning? A bit gory for work.

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      1. HonorBox*

        I took the “joke” to be that because a kid DIDN’T get eaten, they should get a refund. Which means that the expectation is for a kid to get eaten. That’s a joke that needs some punching up.

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  14. DramaQ*

    I joked with a coworker who went to the grand canyon to report back how many people fell off the edge taking selfies. I knew my audience and it had been a topic in the news lately.

    So I’d find the first part of the gator joke pretty funny.

    The second part was too much. I can see how the boss wouldn’t know how to respond to a joke that someone is disappointed kids didn’t get eaten.

    The dead baby parts in a king cake tipped it up and over. Even if coworkers laughed it may have been because they didn’t want to stand out as not “getting the joke”. Some of your coworkers may be more uncomfortable with your joking than you are aware.

    If you have to ask if joking about eating dead babies was too much the answer is yes. If it was an appropriate joke you wouldn’t have to ask about it. You’ve found the line and now it’s time to move it back several feet before you land yourself in HR.

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    1. Autumn leaves*

      Exactly this. I’m a visual person and I automatically see something like that in my head and it’s not what I want to see.

      Reply ↓
      1. DramaQ*

        Oooh maybe we should pair the LW up with the previous letter about the Biggest Loser competition. Nothing to stop getting you to eat sweets like inappropriate visuals!

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    2. But what to call me?*

      Even if all those coworkers did happen to legitimately find the king cake joke funny, I could see the boss getting worried that joking about dead kids was becoming OP’s thing and deciding to talk to them about it before they did it in front of a less appreciative audience or took the laughter as approval to go even darker.

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  15. Wellie*

    I have (at least) two coworkers who have lost children. Avoiding jokes about things that another person might have personally experienced (dead kids in general, not specifically deboning a baby to put it in a cake) is about showing empathy to the experiences of the people around you. It means nothing to you to avoid making that joke, and it means everything to the people around you.

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    2. Observer*

      I don’t think that this LW needs to feel any better. The issue is not whether *someone* might find the jokes funny, but whether they are appropriate in most workplaces, and whether a really, really significant percentage of the population would find them unpleasant, disturbing and / or very upsetting. The answer are absolutely not and definitely yes.

      And as a functional adult, they response they got from their boss should have been enough to help them re-calibrate. I hope that they actually took all of the negative responses on board and changed their behavior.

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  17. HonorBox*

    I enjoy humor of most kinds. That said, I don’t really think either of the “jokes” used as examples are funny at all. The “joke” in the first is that you’d only have to pay if you fed someone to the gators? I’m not going to punch up the jokes, but that one needs some work…

    Not only is there a “know your audience” part of humor, which is a HUGE part of this, there’s also some self governing that needs to be done with humor. Especially at work, you have to know where the line is, and not only not cross that line, but don’t even get near it. You’re at work. You’re not a professional comedian.

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    1. Irish Teacher.*

      I took the joke in the first to be that you took the kids there with the hope of getting rid of a few of them and it didn’t work out, so your money was wasted.

      Reply ↓
  19. Selective Speaker*

    I travel sometimes for work and absolutely hate to fly. I also lost someone in a plane crash, so every time I have to get on a plane, it takes everything I have to get up the courage.

    Years ago, I was getting ready to fly home from a conference when a bunch of my coworkers realized we were all on the same flight. Someone overheard this and started making jokes about checking on the company insurance just in case, and as people walked up to our group, he repeated the joke over and over. It was awful and made getting on that plane so much worse.

    If he knew my history, he would never have made that joke, and I never mentioned it to him because I know he would be horrified.

    Side note: The guy behind me on the flight (not a coworker) made jokes too, about the wings falling off. Why do people do this? Can we all just agree that plane crashes are not funny?

    Reply ↓
    1. LifebeforeCorona*

      I’m a nervous flier and any jokes would fall flat. I’ve been in turbulence landing at night in Miami. Having to wait for the plane to be de-iced so we could leave during a snow storm was just as bad.

      Reply ↓
      1. RVA Cat*

        Seconding – high winds turbulence landing at LaGuardia in broad daylight looking at the fast approaching rooftops of Queens was…not fun.

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    2. Happy meal with extra happy*

      First, I 100% agreed with you that such jokes should not be made, especially with coworkers. But, with regards to your side note, I bet there’s a decent percentage of people who make such jokes because they also are nervous flyers, and it helps them decrease their anxiety.

      Reply ↓
      1. Double A*

        Yes, it’s almost certainly a coping mechanism. I’m not a nervous flier normally so I don’t make these jokes. Right now I am nervous about the current state of air safety because government safety agencies are being gutted and there’s already been one crash as a result, so when I fly later this week you better believe I’ll be joking with my husband about it. But I will try to keep it to just his hearing.

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    3. HonorBox*

      There’s nothing funny about a plane crash.

      And while this is lesser of an offense in the situation you present, if someone decides to repeat their joke more than twice as audience builds, I’ll retroactively take away funny points, even if the person is telling a joke that is truly funny.

      Reply ↓
      1. Adam Sandworm*

        YES. I am very guilty of this, I have to admit. It’s not my best trait. And I work in a place where my jokes often don’t land, so either I’m not funny or these people aren’t my people. I don’t think my jokes are inappropriate, just wrong for the audience. Most of the office either falls into the Dad Joke camp or the Dad Joke-adjacent Work Joke camp (Mondays, amirite?).

        Reply ↓
    4. That Crazy Cat Lady*

      Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who get their jollies from watching other people freak out. I’m sure a lot of them would feel bad if they knew they were ribbing someone with genuine trauma, like in your situation. But still, I think it’s best to avoid that type of humor. It just comes off as mean-spirited most of the time.

      Reply ↓
    5. CityMouse*

      A friend of mine lives in Alexandria near National Airport and actually heard the recent crash, so no, not funny.

      Reply ↓
  20. Spooz*

    I’m glad I’m not the only one who found the first joke OK (not especially funny but not especially evil) but the second joke horrifying. I hope in the years since it was published the LW has had opportunities to reflect on what’s motivating their “dark jokes” in the office.

    Reply ↓
    1. Charlotte Lucas*

      Yes! As someone who grew up on a steady diet of Vincent Price movies, MR James stories, The Addams Family, etc., some people tend to forget that the humor is a very important part of “dark humor.”

      Gross-out humor is something different and rarely funny to me.

      Reply ↓
  21. solipsistnation*

    This really depends on your team and context. I work in a fairly specialized technical field, unix systems administration, where many of the senior people worked their way up from basically hanging out at goth clubs to running networks and infrastructure at large companies. System and network administration is often full of people who have been in the industry a while and are a particular type of person (the joke about the best systems people being goths and furries aren’t ENTIRELY based in fact but it’s sure a disproportionate chunk of the population)– one could make extensive dark weird jokes with them (and have them make them back) BUT only in that context. The people who last long enough to get senior have enough social skills to know when it’s appropriate.

    So, jokes with my team: Okay! Jokes with other teams: Probably not!

    Reply ↓
    1. solipsistnation*

      …to clarify, I’m not talking about mean, punching-down, super gross edgelord “how many dead babies does it take…” dark humor, but sardonic and weird stuff…

      Reply ↓
  22. Jennifer Juniper*

    I tell dad jokes all day long on my team’s Slack chat. The day someone gave me the facepalm emoji was a triumph. Puns are an art.

    Reply ↓
    1. Lellow*

      That sounds absolutely exhausting.

      I used to find dad jokes funny but the amount of people who make them their entire personality and take requests for them to lessen to or stop as validation (so that there’s no way you can actually request this) have really soured me on them. More than a couple in quick succession make my hackles go right up now.

      Reply ↓
      1. Arrietty*

        Fortunately you can just mute people on Slack, or not join the dad-jokes channel. I’m part of an online group with a subsection for puns and I just don’t read those posts.

        Reply ↓
          1. RC*

            If we’re getting updates to Real Life, I have a few other features I’d like to see them to roll out!

            and/or maybe just start the gameplay all over… the judge in the Good Place maybe had a point actually…

            Reply ↓
  23. Tilly Tambo*

    One thing to keep in mind is that if your jokes fall flat, it’s usually because they’re just not funny, or you failed to read the room. These fall more into the cringe commentary category than the joke category to me, and I don’t have an aversion to dark humor at all.

    Reply ↓
    1. That Crazy Cat Lady*

      I agree. I don’t want to pile on LW, but I don’t think these jokes are funny. I’m perfectly fine with dark humor, but these come off to me as just…odd comments.

      Reply ↓
  24. Typity*

    In the early ’70s, “dead baby jokes” were quite a fad for a time — there was a reason Alice Cooper did a song called “Dead Babies”* in 1971 — and I’m sure it’s popped up now and then since. The idea back then was that easily offended people were just weak and party poopers and probably hypocrites, rather than just honestly offended.

    At least LW’s jokes were funny (to me :)! But I can see why many people would not care to hear the cake joke at least — and of course I wouldn’t be glad to see people upset by it.

    *”Dead Babies” is about the disastrous neglect of an unwanted child. But the shouted chorus was all that really registered with us creepy kids — as Alice intended.

    Reply ↓
    1. Spooz*

      I have come to believe firmly that if you tell a joke and the majority of your intended audience doesn’t find it funny, YOU are the one who has failed by misreading the room. THEY have not failed by being po-faced losers. This is a complete volte face from my perspective when I was, ooh, fifteen or so and a complete “pick me”.

      Reply ↓
  25. Tea Monk*

    Certainly read the room. One of my coworkers made a suicide joke, the sort that in many contexts is funny, but it was at a meeting that was supposed to be light hearted so it went over pretty poorly

    Reply ↓
      1. soshedances1126*

        Yeah, please no on the suicide jokes. It’s way too close for too many people and if you’ve dealt with it in any context, it’s traumatizing. I had a coworker who was frustrated with dealing with customer service with Amazon and was complaining to me about it, saying over and over that it was so annoying “she wanted to hang herself”. Little did she know that’s literally how my father passed away sixteen years ago- I had to duck out (probably a bit rudely) before I had a panic attack.

        Reply ↓
        1. Jennifer Juniper*

          I am guessing this woman may have had undiagnosed depression or anxiety. No excuse for those comments, of course.

          Reply ↓
      2. Tea Monk*

        I would like to note I don’t make those jokes, but I used to have a job where people constantly made them. But the job I have now is one where we’re seriously concerned about suicide in clients so she should have read the room.

        Reply ↓
      1. Silver Robin*

        counterpoint: multiple of my friends have attempted, and several of them have joked about it in my presence. Is it dark? Absolutely. Is it funny? Equally so, because my friend are funny people. This is them coping/processing/handling it. And they need friends who can laugh with them.

        Does this mean I should go tell jokes on the topic at work? No. Not at all. Does this mean I am the one making the jokes? Almost never for fear of crossing the laughing with/at boundary. But there are contexts where the jokes are funny and I think there are several more than the zero you claim.

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  26. Nila*

    In my twisted brain, I categorize dark jokes. I enjoy a good “death” dark joke (first joke), but I hate a “gore” dark joke (second joke). I think some of these made-up categories are ok once in a while, but some are absolutely no-no-no at work.

    Reply ↓
  27. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

    I work with people who are basically first responders to incidents and they have VERY dark senses of humour. But the key thing is they don’t use it outside of their group (or once they know you very well and know you are okay with it).

    Also, I did stand up comedy for a while (before the disability) and you *really* have to be able to gauge your audience well before you start on the hard stuff. Never leap into the dark pit without a good engineering study to know how far down you can go without injury.

    You made a mistake, been there and done that. Just know that a good sense of humour and the ability to be funny means being able to adapt.

    Reply ↓
    1. Angstrom*

      Yup. Anyone who’s spent time with nurses/EMTs/firefighters/police has heard jokes that would be completely inappropriate for a standard office environment. Know your audience, know your workplace.

      Reply ↓
      1. Keymaster of Gozer (She/Her)*

        Yup, and a mark of a good comedian is being able to get a laugh from a wide range of people. If you can make the very straight laced guy from another country laugh, your own mother (mine does not like swearing) and your boss who has a mind like a welsh railway (one track and filthy) in the same day without offending them? You’ve got it.

        Goddess knows I’ve messed up in my earlier life and misjudged my audience. The trick is, like with any mistake really, to apologise and learn to not repeat your errors. Never justify them or make excuses.

        Reply ↓
    2. Shadows bone*

      Eh, I don’t know that stand up comedians have to be as cautious about edgy humor as say, Bill the accountant. Edgy comedians are a dime a dozen and even family-friendly comedians lob jokes that fail to land—then they make a joke about that. Nowadays, if a comedian gets “canceled” for being “too edgy” (aka too racist/sexist/homophobic/hit their GF too many times/got too many DUIs etc) it just boosts their popularity even more. But stand up comedians don’t get dragged in front of Linda from HR on Monday morning for giving their spin on the Aristocrats joke to a nightclub full of Millennials. The Millennials might if any of them repeat that joke at their workplaces!

      Bob Saget built a whole career out of “half of you know me as the clean-cut, family friendly host of America’s Funniest Home Videos, half of you know me as the sad widower dad on clean-cut, family friendly sitcom Full House, but the other half of you know me by my true identity: incredibly vulgar, adults-only stand up comic Bob Saget!!!! @$&!?@@ you too pal. And your mother.”

      Reply ↓
  28. Generic Name*

    To anyone who likes to tell jokes at work, please keep in mind that “people laughed” isn’t necessarily a good gauge of how appropriate/successful your jokes are. I laughed (uncomfortably) for years at a coworker’s awful/inappropriate jokes because I didn’t know how else to handle it. I wasn’t in a place where I felt safe directly saying, “I think these jokes are gross and they make me feel uncomfortable. Please stop.” This is especially true if you are in a position of power. People may feel like they have to laugh to keep things smooth at work.

    Reply ↓
  29. HannahS*

    I think the rules of satire apply: if you’re punching up, it can be funny. If you’re punching down, you’re being a jerk.

    Doctors are notorious for dark humour at work, but there’s a difference between joking about how miserable you are and how absurd the job can be, compared to straight up making fun of patients. One is a coping mechanism. The other is cruel.

    Reply ↓
    1. HannahS*

      There’s also a conversation about privilege in here, but I can’t quite get it into words.

      Remember when suicide jokes were SOOOOOO edgy and dark and funny in the mid-2000s? I remember a lot of people miming shooting themselves and hanging themselves? And all the rape jokes? And then we all collectively realized that suicide and rape aren’t joking topics when you live in a society that doesn’t take them seriously. and that a huge number of people have experience with suicide or rape and are silenced.

      Reply ↓
    2. Junior Dev*

      I don’t think this is a good rule in general and especially not for work. It’s also likely to get people in trouble because regardless of whether you think the jokes are acceptable or funny on some cosmic level, insulting people more powerful than you seems like a rather obvious way to get those people upset with you. But also people are bad at telling who the joke “hits” – like if you tell a joke where the punchline is the boss is fat and balding, you risk upsetting anyone else with either of those features.

      “No, see, *I* know exactly who will and won’t be offended by my jokes and I guarantee they’ll only offend the correct people” are you *sure*? Sure enough to subject all your coworkers to it?

      Reply ↓
      1. HB*

        ” like if you tell a joke where the punchline is the boss is fat and balding, you risk upsetting anyone else with either of those features.”

        It might be because I’m familiar generally with the punching up vs down discourse that Hannah S is referring to… but this example is basically the opposite of what they’re suggesting.

        Punching up isn’t just about the intended target – it’s about what the punchline implies in general. Implying or stating that someone is worthy of derision based on physical characteristics is making fun of *all* people with those characteristics. The risk isn’t that you might upset someone by doing so, it’s that you might reveal that you’re a bad person for thinking that’s funny.

        Reply ↓
        1. Junior Dev*

          I’m also familiar with this discourse. I’m aware it often conceives of “punching up” as being more about groups that are acceptable targets rather than individuals. I think it’s wise to say that vulnerable people especially shouldn’t be the target of jokes; my point is that the inverse isn’t true and it’s not necessarily “safe” to mock or insult some person or group that you’ve identified as privileged. I’m sure we could go through a ton of potential examples but more broadly, any sort of “punching” humor that’s targeting a person or group of people risks hurting someone else, or hurting the target for reasons one didn’t intend. So maybe rather than identifying a “safe” group of people to mock, it would be best to avoid jokes that belittle a person or group of people at all, in the workplace. That’s all.

          Reply ↓
  30. Beveled Edge*

    There are certain aspects of dark humor you should just avoid at work because you’ll never fully know your audience. As AAM has said many times before, there’s a certain amount of censoring yourself necessary at work to keep the workplace functional, and your coworkers won’t share their triggers with you. (Exceptions of course for examples like nurses, first responders who see dark stuff as part of their job and deal with it differently.)

    For example, I hear a baby-eating joke and my brain links it to the Blood Libel and I go on high alert and think “what kind of person would ever joke about something like that or think it was funny???” I’d feel unsafe around the person who made that joke. And like others above, I’d probably get a horrible mental image around the “deboning” detail that would stick in my head for the rest of the day.

    Reply ↓
    1. Lizcase*

      ii thought of this too. I hate dead baby jokes, but will tolerate them if thats the group vibe. Eating baby jokes are a whole level up in wrongness, and I would likely say something.

      Reply ↓
  31. Hush42*

    As a manager of several employees who frequently utilize dark humor. It’s entirely possible that your manager does think your humor is funny, but as your manager also knows that talking about baby cannibalism isn’t necessarily appropriate for a workplace. So in the moment they want to laugh but don’t want to encourage so it ends up as awkward laughter… but maybe that’s just me.

    Reply ↓
  32. Lemons*

    I had a boss once who requested interviewees tell a joke in the job interview, because he hired generally awkward people who would have to interact with customers and he needed to make sure they would act right. While I’m pretty ambivalent on whether that’s a good inclusion in an interview, he did once get someone who decided to make a genocide joke to his potential future boss (I heard the joke and it was a LOT more specific and worse than LW’s examples). Yikers!

    Related: I have a very tame chuckle/groan-worthy dad joke locked and loaded at all times now just in case I find myself in a similar joke-request situation.

    Reply ↓
    1. Labracadabrador*

      My wholesome fallback joke is the source of my username: What breed of dog is the best at magic tricks? A Labracadabrador Retriever!

      But yeah, wow. If, during an interview, when people are presumably on their best behavior and trying to impress the interviewer(s), you’re asked to tell a joke and your winning punchline is genocide… that says a lot about you! And absolutely none of it is good! Also raises the question of where he heard said joke and what other things he might have been “learning” from that source, aka what weird radicalized internet rabbit holes he may have been in.

      Reply ↓
    2. Observer*

      he did once get someone who decided to make a genocide joke to his potential future boss

      Classic “there may not be a RIGHT answer, but there are sure WRONG ones!”

      I’s say that this could be taken as proof that your boss had a good point.

      Reply ↓
    4. Baroness Schraeder*

      “I have a very tame chuckle/groan-worthy dad joke locked and loaded at all times now just in case I find myself in a similar joke-request situation.”

      Where do you store them? In a dad-abase?

      Reply ↓
  33. SB*

    A lot of the advice is “know your audience” but I would flip that to “know yourself.” I think it would be helpful to examine why you want to make dark jokes.

    Is the job stressful and you want to blow off steam/bond with your group? Are you genuinely trying to keep the conversation going? Are you trying to be edgy to set yourself apart? Are you annoyed that your coworkers won’t quit talking about their kids and you’re trying to shock them?

    I think understanding this would be helpful because it’ll give you the information you need on whether the joke is appropriate for the group. Some dark humor is funny. Some is off-putting and conversation killer. And some, I suspect, you’re just doing to needle your colleagues.

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  34. Emily Byrd Starr*

    Unless you’re a staff writer for “South Park” or a similar show, dark comedy doesn’t belong at work.

    Reply ↓
    1. allathian*

      Or a first responder, doctor, nurse, pathologist etc.

      A friend of a friend used to work as a 112 operator (911 in the US) and she said that the jokes the operators told each other were very dark and often inspired by real events.

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  35. Bananapants*

    Oof the first example I think is outlandish enough (and vague enough) to come off as more of a dumb dad joke, but the second one is way too detailed, visceral, and gory–a PIECE of baby? Deboning?! Also the phrase “I have a dark/edgy sense of humor” immediately sets me on edge, as way too many people who say that end up falling into edgelord territory and just trying to be shocking because they think it makes them cooler than other people. I hope OP learned to tone it down.

    Reply ↓
    1. Elbe*

      I tend to agree. Some people do it well, but most people who claim to have dark or edgy humor typically just mean that they expect people to laugh when they say things that are gross / mean / inappropriate.

      Whenever I hear someone say that people regularly “don’t understand” their sense of humor, my gut response is always that it’s probably them who doesn’t understand others’ sense of humor. If you’re the one cracking a joke, it’s on you to read the room. If you want people to laugh, it’s on you to figure out what makes them laugh.

      Reply ↓
  37. Junior Assistant Peon*

    Someone once brought a king cake to my job. We’re far away from New Orleans, and unfamiliar with the custom. My boss damn near choked on the plastic baby because he wasn’t expecting it!

    Reply ↓
  38. Elbe*

    I know that the question was framed as dark humor vs. lighter humor, but I also just want to add that the LW should also be careful about how many jokes they make. Work isn’t comedy hour and these people are coworkers, not a captive audience. If the LW finds themselves trying to make jokes a lot, they should keep in mind that this can be annoying. Sometimes people just want to have a conversation without feeling like the response that they give is going to be a jumping off point for another joke.

    A lot of this really just comes down to being able to read a room. Make jokes in moderation, around people who seem to appreciate them and who reciprocate the vibe.

    Reply ↓
  39. tina turner*

    RULE #1 — Be funny. I don’t find these examples funny and for sure not at work.
    If you find a peer at work who tells you how funny you are, fine, talk to each other.

    Reply ↓
  40. Yeah...*

    This whole comment section is an example to why one should remember co-workers are not your friends. Act accordingly.

    Reply ↓
  41. Hydrates all the flasks*

    I’m into dark humor but uhh, I’m side-eying those jokes a little. Even though I do shy away from it at work, even in workplaces that are big on gallows humor–healthcare is notorious for that type of humor, for example. Maybe it’s the back-to-back nature of the jokes, or the specific examples…IDK. I guess I’m a little stuck on the “they went to a place that’s all about alligators so of course I’d make a joke about kids getting eaten by alligators–anyone else would have, amirite?????” aspect. And the “use a real baby for a King’s Cake” joke to a coworker’s totally normal statement of not wanting to introduce a choking hazard into the office (that seems like a pretty common way to do King’s Cakes too?).

    Reply ↓
  42. MillennialHR*

    This manager is concerned that you don’t understand social norms and now people are eating a cake thinking about a dead baby being in said cake, which is gross. It’s especially odd often a coworker cited safety as the reason the cake did not have a baby in it, so I can see why your manager was weirded out. I would say the first one is on the edge of dark humor and agree with other commenters that it’s funny because it’s so near to impossible for it to happen. The second one forces people to think about deboning a child, which again, is gross. I would caution your thoughts of dark humor, because they may not (and do not!!!) align with what others would approve.

    Reply ↓
    1. Withheld*

      Jokes at work are best when they are rare and unexpected. Seems like the sweet spot is an occasional quip, which won’t cause the listeners nightmares.

      Multiple times a day is too much. Even for non-graphic jokes and definitely for Dad jokes. They’re reserved for Father’s Day only.

      P.S. I laughed, but I am not visual or literal.

      Reply ↓
  43. nnn*

    Added to Alison’s guidelines, it’s probably best not to make gross jokes about the food that people are literally in the process of eating (or are about to eat, or have just eaten)

    Reply ↓
  44. Hydrates all the flasks*

    My last thought of the day, as Not Fun Police:

    In my experience, people who are all, “I just like dark humor, I’m the edgiest of edgeloards, you squares just don’t get it!” etc are less humorous and more…just plain jerks? And in a workplace environment, that gets real old real fast.

    And while there are some workplaces where dark humor is a bit more accepted because of the nature of the work, or the intensity of the work, that doesn’t mean that:
    1) it’s a free-for-all where anything goes
    2) it’s a 24/7, universal “all dark jokes all the time everywhere, we’ve never heard of HR” experience (see item 1)
    Again, going back to healthcare…like, there could be stuff that’s off limit for jokes. There could be healthcare workplaces that aren’t as free-wheeling with the edgy humor as other HC workplaces. And HR exists at a hospital too so it’s not like you can just constantly let ‘er rip with your “best” joke about …I’m not even going to name an example because I don’t want to get flagged.

    So yeah, I think the world would probably be a slightly better place if self-professed “edgelords” kept that part of their persona at home instead of ever bringing it to work.

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  45. Hydrates all the flasks*

    Really, this letter is just reminding me of a coworker a few jobs back who was a self-professed “edgy, dark humor, yall just don’t get me!” kind of a person. And she was the biggest pill EVER. In addition to the “edgelord” persona, she was just a miserable, morale-killing coworker ALL the time. And rude AF too. To everyone. And generally difficult to work with. And I honestly feel like the dark humor and difficult personality were related, at least in her case. So whenever someone describes themselves as, “oh I like dark humor even at work, lol” or, “you know me, I can’t help but be edgy ALL the time!” my immediate internal impression is, “ugh. You must be a joy [/s] to work with.” Haven’t been proven wrong so far.

    We spend so much of our waking lives at work and most of us don’t get paid enough for such a huge chunk of that time. Let’s not compound the insult by constantly subjecting our coworkers to our [very middling] Tight 20.

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  46. TerrorCotta*

    In the very very early Internet days, I made being a “Dark Humor Girl Not Like The Other Girls” my entire personality. I even got paid for it! Lots of dead baby jokes, because I was a *hack*. I understood the uncomfortable reaction laughs were from DISCOMFORT, but somehow thought that was a goal.

    It’s incredibly embarrassing now, and it should have been embarrassing then.

    There’s a place for dark/coping/impolite humor. But even if you’re using a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer, think about who you might be cutting.

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  47. SaeniaKite*

    See this is one thing I worry about if I ever move out of healthcare into a more ‘traditional’ workplace. Dark humour is one of the ways we survive and I think it will be a hard transition for me to put the filter back up

    Reply ↓
    1. Wellie*

      If you move out of healthcare, you will find you have fewer dark things to joke about. The transition will happen naturally.

      Reply ↓
  48. Last tiger of Tasmania*

    I wouldn’t think twice about the alligator joke, but the king cake one? Yeesh. That’s unnecessarily graphic and revolting. The fact that you group these two into the same general “dark” category suggests to me there’s a bit of a struggle with understanding nuance around appropriateness and boundaries. It’s probably best to avoid jokes that might be taken the wrong way unless you can learn to navigate that line better.

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  49. Lilac*

    Also as a general rule don’t make gross jokes around food, whether at work or in other social situations where you don’t know everyone in your audience. Nothing makes some people feel like losing their appetite faster than having their food be the subject of a dark joke like the dead baby one. And it really sucks when it was going to be be something really delicious or at a special event.

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  50. Meow*

    I feel like, if OP already know that there is a person in that work space who is uncomfortable with their jokes, they should stop and keep the jokes at the level where the most sensitive person feels palatable. It’s no different to say, if your coworker is really uncomfortable with whole pineapples, it doesn’t matter if generically it’s socially acceptable to take a whole pineapple eberywhere with you, it’s just good idea to leave that head of pineapple at home if you are working with them. This is just basic consideration, and I’m saying this as someone whose workplace is entirely fuelled by really dark jokes.

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  51. Jean*

    can we have a round up of jokes gone wrong at work? I don’t think I’ve seen that topic specifically yet. I have my own feel bad example, would be cathartic to know I’m not the only one!

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  52. JJ*

    If the joke is going to be crude /offensive /dark it needs to be really funny to make up for it. The biggest issue with cake baby joke was that it wasn’t funny. Aim to fulfill the (funny-horrible)>0 equation to add net merriment to life.
    Yes obviously what other commenters are saying, like you don’t know other people’s backgrounds, humor is different for everyone etc is true. But there are objectively good jokes out there, so if a truly great opportunity comes along to tell a horrible joke (mad men – foot in the door?) I say go for it.

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  53. Peanut Hamper*

    I don’t have a problem with either of those jokes, but I also wouldn’t want to hear them at work.

    We’re here to work, after all. Unless this job is just utterly terrible in some way that we all know and understand, I don’t know why “dark humour” has to be a thing. Or any humor, for that matter.

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    1. Bob*

      Got to show your workmates how edgy and cool you are, what if they stopped going home and telling their friends about their awesome and funny college that is soooo funny!

      Reply ↓
  54. Just say oui*

    I thought the jokes were dumb, didn’t elicit a smile, but I laughed out loud at the OP’s realization about what the boss thinks about him.

    Reply ↓
  55. toolegittoresign*

    Too many comments seem to think the issue is whether or not the joke is funny. That doesn’t really matter. Being gory or ghoulish at work isn’t a good idea.

    Like the zombie props of other letters or excitedly re-hashing the plot of a horror movie you like to coworkers before bothering to ask them if they even like horror — know that death and violence are just as sensitive a subject at work as sex and try to avoid them. Reserve those topics for your life outside work.

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  56. Heffalump*

    There have been comments upthread about people in health care having dark senses of humor. Some years ago I was dating a nurse, and on our 2nd or 3rd date, we went out for dinner. We fell to discussing bulimia, of all things, and she said, “Bulimia wouldn’t be expensive if you had a dog. The dog might even start following your around.”

    I could not take a bite for the next couple of minutes for cracking up! Unfortunately, she went on to be the one that got away.

    She once said she didn’t read news stories about assaults, robberies, etc., because she saw the victims in the ER all the time.

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  57. Niles "the Coyote" Crane*

    I gagged at the cake/baby joke. In an office, that would stay on my mind. I might have that association with you forever. Honestly, I’m a bit of a queasy person, I know this wouldn’t be everyone, but that made me feel quite sick.

    I do occasionally make jokes at work that could be considered a little dark. I’ve definitely overstepped in the past when I was young. I didn’t even think it was dark humour! It was just humour to me. And then I realised these are actually dark topics.

    For me, a key thing is not just “read the room, do these people like this type of humour, do we know each other”. But can the person/people you make the joke to tell you if they don’t like it? If you’re they’re boss, or in a fairly senior role, then I just don’t think it’s worth the risk that someone would be really bothered, feel unable to say anything, but have it on their mind in all sorts of ways from then onwards.

    Work-friends who are peers, maybe, but even then, are you *sure* they love it? Are you sure they don’t just… not hate it? Are you sure they wouldn’t prefer you didn’t do it?

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  58. Silliness instead of darkness*

    I, too, have a dark sense of humor, but it does not come to work with me. If you need to make jokes (and I do), maybe try to lean into absurdity or silliness and avoid anything transgressive. And choose your audience carefully. My general rule of thumb is if you wouldn’t tell the joke in front of a holy man/woman, it probably isn’t a good joke for a broad audience at work. Leave the really dark stuff for your closest work confidants or your personal life outside of work.

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