Dark Humor as a Coping Strategy for People with Disabilities

People with disabilities experience a huge number of associated difficulties on a daily basis, and all of this undoubtedly leads to a huge amount of stress that that they cope with in different ways. The purpose of this study was to determine the place of dark humor in coping-strategies of individuals with disabilities, since black humor is an unexplored potential part of coping behavior, as opposed to humor that does not address unethical themes. This research is based on an assumption that publishing content that contains black humor over a given life situation, in this case disability, could be part of the coping-strategy by getting a positive response to such content. This study analyzed content on the TikTok platform published by people with different disabilities. Through the content analysis of the videos, as well as the emotional analysis of the comments under them, it was found that authors can indeed use the publication of such content as part of an unconscious copying strategy by getting a positive response to their content. The emotional analysis of the comments proved the prevalence of positive reactions over negative ones, and the same trend was demonstrated by videos containing not black humor over disability, but just stories about lived situations. From this it was concluded that black humor occupies the same place in the strategy of coping with life’s difficulties as not touching unethical themes humor.