When Luigi Mangione was arrested in December 2024 for the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, much of the internet did something that baffled older observers: it made memes. Tributes. Fan edits. Dark jokes. Viral sounds. The humor was layered, irreverent, and deeply uncomfortable to many people who found it incomprehensible that a murder was being processed this way.
An experimental psychologist at the University of Oklahoma, Dr. Kevin Lanning, decided to examine what was actually happening. He spent months studying the online reactions to the Mangione case and the humor surrounding him. What he found is not what most people who were disturbed by the memes assumed.
What the Humor Is Not
The instinctive interpretation — that making jokes about a murder reflects a generation without moral values, empathy, or basic decency — is, according to Lanning's research, wrong.
"In my assessment, Gen Z's dark and nonsensical humor does not show a lack of moral values," he writes in The Conversation. "It's instead the product of its desire to engage in more authentic conversations about what they believe."
The distinction is important. The humor isn't celebrating violence — it's refusing to perform the prescribed emotional script. Many Gen Zers who made Mangione memes were, in the same breath, voicing genuine anger about the American healthcare system, the role of insurance companies in denying coverage, and a sense that the formal channels for expressing that anger have consistently produced nothing. The meme was the expression. The murder was the occasion, not the point.
Why Dark Humor Becomes the Language
Research shows deep levels of alienation among Gen Z — <cite index="8-1">having grown up with smartphones and social media, this generation has come of age in an increasingly online world, and despite the internet's capacity for instantaneous interaction, followers have proved a poor replacement for friends.</cite>
What emerges from that disconnection, psychologists who study coping mechanisms have found, is dark humor. It is one of the oldest human strategies for managing situations that feel overwhelming, absurd, or beyond personal control. Medical workers, soldiers, and emergency responders have used dark humor as a professional survival mechanism for as long as those professions have existed. What's changed is that Gen Z is applying it to civic and political life.
The psychology behind why it works is specific: dark humor creates emotional distance from a situation that would otherwise feel unbearable. It signals group membership — "I see this the same way you do" — while simultaneously resisting the pressure to perform emotions that feel fake or selective. In Lanning's framing, when institutions behave in ways that feel absurd or unjust, responding with absurdist humor is itself a coherent moral stance.
The Authenticity Problem — and What Older Generations Misread
The generational gap here isn't really about values. It's about how moral positions are communicated.
Older generations are generally more comfortable with what might be called performed outrage — formal expressions of appropriate emotion, issued through appropriate channels, in response to appropriate events. Gen Z, raised on social media's incentive structures, has grown deeply skeptical of performed emotion. They've watched enough viral condemnation cycles, enough social media pile-ons, enough selective outrage, to be suspicious of the form itself.
"These reactions are better understood not as a rejection of value but as a refusal to participate in conversations that feel selective and disconnected from young people's broader economic and political frustrations," Lanning writes.
Making a meme about Mangione wasn't, for most who did it, an endorsement of murder. It was a way of saying: this situation is absurd, the healthcare system is absurd, and I am not going to perform the grief that is being socially demanded of me for a CEO while actual patients die from coverage denials without anyone making fan edits about them.
What This Means for How We Read Gen Z
The mistake older observers make, repeatedly, is interpreting the humor as the message rather than the medium. Gen Z is not communicating that violence is acceptable. It is communicating — using the tools available to it — that something is deeply wrong, and that the formal mechanisms for addressing that wrongness have failed them.
That does not make the humor comfortable or unambiguous. Mangione was convicted of murder. Whatever was wrong with the healthcare system before remains wrong. Dark humor is a coping mechanism and a form of expression, not a policy solution. And it can coexist — as it does in Lanning's research — with a genuine moral reckoning about both the individual act and the systemic conditions that made the reaction so widespread.
The question worth sitting with isn't whether the memes were appropriate. It's what it means that an entire generation's most fluent language for moral outrage looks, to everyone else, like a joke.
