People often treat mockery as harmless. A laugh, a joke, a put-down during sport, a comment about someone’s body, clothes, voice, weakness, poverty, mistake, or quiet nature can be dismissed as ordinary banter.
But research into bullying, humiliation, verbal abuse and social rejection points to something more serious. Words can injure. Laughter can humiliate. Repeated ridicule can shape how a person sees themselves long after the moment has passed.
The problem is not laughter itself. Human beings need humour. Families, schools, sports teams and communities all use humour to connect. The problem begins when laughter is built on one person being made small so others can feel entertained, powerful, accepted, or superior.
That is where casual joking becomes something darker.
Psychologists have long studied the pain of social rejection. In a well-known fMRI study published in Science, Naomi Eisenberger, Matthew Lieberman and Kipling Williams found that social exclusion activated brain regions associated with distress and pain. The study did not say rejection is identical to physical injury, but it showed that the brain does not treat social pain as something imaginary or trivial. Social rejection registers as real distress.
This helps explain why people can remember being mocked years after others have forgotten it. The person who made the joke may move on in seconds. The person laughed at may carry the moment as proof that they are unwanted, ugly, weak, stupid, poor, different, or not safe among others.
That is the part often missed. Mockery does not land on an empty surface. It lands on a person with a history.
A child who has already been rejected at home may hear a classroom joke differently. A teenager who is ashamed of their body may hear teasing as confirmation of what they fear. An adult who grew up poor may still feel the sting when people make jokes about clothes, food, speech, or family background. An elderly person may be hurt deeply when others laugh at their weakness, forgetfulness, or dependence.
Age changes how people hide the wound. It does not remove the wound.
A child may cry. A teenager may rebel. An adult may become angry, proud, silent, defensive, controlling, or hard to reach. An older person may withdraw and stop expecting care from anyone. From the outside, people only see behaviour. They do not always see the shame that helped create it.
Research on peer verbal abuse gives weight to this concern. A study led by Martin Teicher, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, examined exposure to peer verbal abuse among young adults. The study linked peer verbal abuse with higher psychiatric symptom scores, including anxiety, depression, anger-hostility, dissociation and drug use. It also found associations with differences in white-matter structures in the brain, including the corpus callosum.
The study is important because it deals directly with harm caused not only by parents or adults, but by peers. In other words, the words of classmates, teammates, cousins, siblings, friends and other young people can leave deep marks.
This is where schools need to take the issue more seriously. Anti-bullying messages already exist, but many students still grow up learning that mocking others is normal. They hear insults in classrooms, playgrounds, sports courts, online chats, family gatherings and community spaces. They learn that rough talk is part of belonging.
By adulthood, the pattern is already embedded.
Adults then carry the same behaviour into workplaces, churches, families, sports teams and social media. They still make fun of someone’s weight, accent, poverty, looks, family situation, weakness, awkwardness or past mistakes. They still call it humour. They still tell the hurt person not to be sensitive.
That is not maturity. It is childhood cruelty that was never corrected.
New Zealand schools are not outside this problem. The Education Review Office said in 2019 that bullying is a serious issue in New Zealand schools and that New Zealand had one of the highest rates of bullying among OECD member countries. The existence of anti-bullying policy is not enough if students continue to learn, through daily social behaviour, that humiliation is entertainment.
The issue also appears in sport. Basketball, rugby, football and other competitive spaces often include a culture of showing off, trash talk and rough verbal exchanges. Some of it may be playful when there is trust and respect underneath. But the line is crossed when the talk becomes personal, humiliating, aggressive, or targeted at someone’s insecurity.
Researchers studying trash talk and trolling have observed that trash talk is part of many competitive environments, especially male sporting cultures, and that it can be used to unsettle, dominate or provoke others. The danger is that repeated exposure can normalise the idea that strength means being able to insult and absorb insult.
But not everyone absorbs it the same way.
One player may laugh because they are not hurt. Another may laugh because they are trying not to become the next target. Another may go home replaying the words. Another may decide they are useless and stop showing up.
When people say, “That is just how we talk,” they may be telling the truth about the culture. But that does not make the culture harmless.
There is also an older word that helps describe part of this behaviour: Schadenfreude. It is a German word made from Schaden, meaning harm or damage, and Freude, meaning joy. Merriam-Webster defines it as joy at another person’s pain or misfortune.
Schadenfreude is not ordinary humour. It is the pleasure of seeing another person lowered.
A 2009 study published in Science found that when misfortune happened to an envied person, stronger feelings of schadenfreude were linked with activation in the brain’s reward system, including the ventral striatum. That finding matters because it shows that people can experience another person’s downfall as rewarding.
This does not mean every joke is malicious. But it does show that human beings are capable of enjoying another person’s humiliation, especially when the group rewards it with laughter.
That is where mockery becomes dangerous. The group laughs. The person being mocked is forced to smile. If they object, they are told they cannot take a joke. The injury is then doubled. First, they are humiliated. Then they are blamed for feeling humiliated.
Public humiliation has also been studied as a mental health issue. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis found that public humiliation was linked with worse mental health outcomes, including emotional distress, anxiety, depression, stress, post-traumatic stress symptoms and suicidal ideation or attempts.
The evidence does not support the idea that humiliation is harmless. It supports what many people already know from experience: shame can remain inside a person long after the crowd stops laughing.
Bullying research points in the same direction. A review by Louise Arseneault found that young victims of bullying had higher rates of mental health problems later in life, including agoraphobia, depression, anxiety, panic disorder and suicidality in early to mid-adulthood. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine also concluded that bullying has short-term and long-term consequences for children and young people, including psychological effects that can continue into adulthood.
This should change how people think about jokes.
The question should not only be, “Was it funny?” The better question is, “Who paid the price for the laugh?”
If the joke requires someone to be shamed, exposed, reduced, or reminded of a wound, then the joke is not innocent. It may look light from the outside, but inside the person it can become another layer of rejection.
Some of the most damaging comments are the ones people think are small. A joke about weight. A joke about being slow. A joke about someone’s old shoes. A joke about their family. A joke about being poor. A joke about their accent. A joke about not being smart. A joke about being single, divorced, childless, unemployed, shy, emotional, or different.
For one person, the comment may pass. For another, it may touch the exact place they have spent years trying to heal.
Research on weight-related teasing gives a clear example. University of Bristol researchers found that weight-related teasing by family members during adolescence was linked to higher internalised weight stigma at age 31. The finding was not explained by differences in body mass index. This means the harm was not simply about weight itself. It was about the shame attached to the words.
That is the pattern across many forms of mockery. The words do not only describe a person. They can teach a person how to see themselves.
Schools should teach this much earlier and much more directly. Children should learn that laughter can connect people, but it can also wound people. They should learn the difference between humour that includes and humour that humiliates. They should learn that confidence does not require making someone else small. They should learn that strength is not proven by cruelty.
This lesson should not stop at school. Adults need it too.
Homes need it. Churches need it. Sports teams need it. Workplaces need it. Online communities need it. Many adults still speak as if they have never been taught that another person’s dignity is not a toy.
Mockery often survives because it is socially protected. People defend it with familiar lines. “It was just a joke.” “Everyone says things like that.” “You are too sensitive.” “That is how we talk.” “Harden up.”
Those lines protect the person who caused the harm. They do not protect the person who was harmed.
A more honest standard is needed. If people want to joke, they should make sure the laughter does not depend on someone being humiliated. If people want to compete, they should compete without attacking another person’s dignity. If people want to be funny, they should be funny without turning weakness, poverty, body shape, family pain, grief, trauma or insecurity into entertainment.
The deeper issue is human dignity.
Every person carries a private history. Some carry rejection from childhood. Some carry poverty. Some carry abuse. Some carry failure. Some carry grief. Some carry years of being compared, laughed at, dismissed, or treated as less than others. A careless joke may not create all of that pain, but it can reopen it.
That is why this subject deserves more than a poster, a slogan, or a school assembly once a year.
It deserves to be taught as part of how people live with one another.
The harm of mockery is not only in the sound of laughter. It is in what the laughter tells the person being mocked: you are not safe here, your pain is entertainment, your dignity can be used for our amusement.
That is why casual cruelty should not be treated as innocent.
A society that teaches children how to read, count, pass exams and prepare for work should also teach them one of the most basic lessons of human life: do not make another person’s wound the reason people laugh.
