Title: Field Guide: Sarcastic Masters | Psychology Today
Headings: Field Guide: Sarcastic Masters
Field Guide: Sarcastic Masters
They're smart, they're funny, and they know it. But is cracking jokes that put other people down truly wise?
Genesis of the Jibe
Sarcasm's Slippery Slope
When to Take The Edge Off

Content: Sarcasm doesn't help satisfy a Napoleon complex, but it does give you a little ego boost." article continues after advertisement
Albert Katz, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Western Ontario, has recently looked at the wisecrackers' focus on one-upsmanship from a biological perspective, showing that people whose brains are best equipped to understand sarcasm tend to have aggressive personalities. Subjects who scored high on aggression tests showed different patterns of brain activity in response to sarcasm than those who did not. The differences suggest that the aggressive subjects were processing nonliteral meaning more quickly. " Sarcasm is definitely a dominance thing—it's related to being top dog," Katz says, both for initiators of sarcastic banter and those who catch on and offer a retort. A knack for sarcasm isn't necessarily linked to intelligence, says Simone Shamay-Tsoory, a neurologist at the University of Haifa in Israel. Some highly intelligent people who have autism or Asperger's syndrome, for example, may fail to understand jokes and sarcasm. But her research has shown that people who are particularly good at detecting sarcasm also tend to be better at identifying emotional facial expressions. They seem to understand social situations better overall, she says. Such superior social intelligence may be behind Joakim's conclusion that those who can hang with sarcasm are always the most interesting conversation partners at a party.