Dark Humour in Photography

With the invention of photography and the camera, people have been given the possibility to immortalize moments in time that evoke incongruities in everyday life and document photographic jokes laughing in the face of death or ridiculing a certain class of people or race. Therefore, the camera has served as a means for different types of laughter not always with the subject as the humourist but the photographer himself. The aim of this work is to analyse how photographic humour works and its diachronic development throughout the years with particular focus on dark humour and how the latter is processed cognitively. Furthermore, this paper seeks to answer the questions of why some pictures make us laugh more than others and how has humour shifted according to the society and times we live in.