The Science of Dark Humor - Dr. Sonja Heintz - #63

Art of the Question · Oct 12, 2026 · 1h 5m · transcript

Sonja Heintz is a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Plymouth, where she studies the psychology of humour and positive psychology. She earned her PhD at the University of Zurich under Willibald Ruch, one of the leading figures in humour research, and has spent around fifteen years studying what makes people laugh and how humour styles differ from person to person. Her work builds a framework of distinct comic styles, expanding the field's long-standing handful of categories into a far more detailed model that now distinguishes twenty-three. One of her studies looked at whether people…