Vulgarity and hilarity: The dark tetrad and HEXACO as predictors of creating aggressive, obscene, and otherwise offensive humor

The present research applied the Dark Tetrad and HEXACO models to individual differences in the creation of vulgar humor: jokes that are disparaging, obscene, hostile, taboo, or otherwise offensive. A sample of 530 adults completed the SD4 and HEXACO-100 and a creative humor production task, and their responses were coded for vulgar content using Detoxify, a large language model trained to detect offensive material. Creating vulgar humor was associated with being male, younger, and less educated. None of the HEXACO traits significantly predicted vulgarity, but the Dark Tetrad trait of sadism predicted significantly greater vulgarity. Taken together, the findings shed light on who is likely to create jokes that violate norms of politeness.