Hello friends. Today in my mission to heal from narcissistic parent abuse, I'll show how a narcissist outs herself by the things she finds funny. This will also help us understand how narcissist parents damage their children with seemingly good things like humor. Here are 10 weird forms of humor that narcissist parents use to sabotage their child's sense of self. Contradictorily, if anyone jokes in this way about the narcissist, they become enraged. Narcissists, especially malignant narcissistic parents LOOOOVVEEE to make their kid the butt of jokes but they HATE being the ass end of them. I'll list these 10 weird humor forms and explain what it says about the parent.
Just saying or gotcha jokes These are insidious demi-jokes in which the narcissist points out something in such a way that draws all eyes to the child. It's not a bad thing but it's embarrassing. That's why the narcissist points it out. The narcissist would choke on her own tongue before saying something positive about the child. She strategically does it at a time when the child can do nothing about it but feel embarrassed. Or she announces after the window to fix it has passed. And if she can't be called on it because everyone would say the narcissist is just being helpful. She's not. She likes seeing the victim squirm. And she can't even be said to be mocking because she says it seriously. But she hopes others will laugh. She does not chastise her children for laughing (Yes I'm thinking of my dad's wife). And interestingly it's not anything anyone else would notice or if they did would tell the child privately and help her fix it not save it to make a laughingstock of the child. When I was 14, stepmother loudly announced at Christmas that I had a run in my nylons. She and my aunt scoffed behind their hands. I wonder how funny it would have been if I'd said, "Maybe it's because you make me buy my own clothes and I can't afford new??"
Teasing (heckling, kidding, razzing) I'm not a fan of teasing, period. Because it's never about something the person is proud of but embarrassed about. We don't jokingly say nice dress or good job on the math test because we mean it. What would be the point? If we sincerely mean it we sincerely say it. But the point of teasing is to make someone feel bad. If she laughs along, it's no fun. So teasing always has to sting, to hit a nerve. And for that to work, the target must feel the sting and know she's been stung. Nice people don't tease. Ever. They don't like to see people feel ashamed. They make jokes about innocent things that make everyone laugh. A narcissist's outs herself by the fact that she finds others' discomfort funny.
Lampooning, mocking, roasting, ridiculing. Call it what you will, it all amounts to shaming the child, by making fun of her for things she can't help. It's no different that a bunch of playground bullies playing monkey in the middle, laughing at the poor kid with polio braces. Only these are grown adults who are supposed to be protecting their children FROM this kind of abuse, not leading the jeers! These aren't nice people. They are nasty bullies who get off on making others feel small.
Cynical snark and snide sarcasm. And other such above-it-all-ness. With feigned innocence, they point out (loudly in front of others) something they know the child would be uncomfortable about. Because anyone would. They find a chink and poke at it till it's a chasm. Again, it's almost always something no one else noticed until THEY the parents pointed it out. My mother once announced that I had pubic hair at a family gathering. My dad pointedly insulted me for something that inadvertently went wrong at a party for his son that I had planned.
Shaming dressed as gentle reproof. They try and fail to cloak as "for your own good" correction what are actually smug, spiteful digs. And you know it's just that because if it were kindly meant correction, they'd do it privately and in love. So they do it in sneaky underhanded ways that they think others will see as loving. Because they either know it's not true or they've exaggerated it and will look like the nasty people they are. Sometimes other folks catch, sometimes they don't. But the child always gets this sucker punch for what it is.
Scolding mockery (loudly in front of others) They use this kind of "humor" as a form of correction to make the child feel foolish and chagrined about something she supposedly did wrong. Supposedly, feeling stupid will make her perform better in future. I don't know about you, but humiliation never taught me anything except that I'm a worthless piece of shit who doesn't deserve gently, loving parent correction. You've seen the parents on Youtube shaming their child (on the Internet, as you do) for some offense. But it always has the reverse effect of making the parent look like the idiot and the poor child someone you want to rescue from them.
DARVO mocking. The narcissist parent continually provokes a response in the victim. My dad would endlessly rage bait me. If I cried, got mad or reacted he loved this even more. He weaponized my reaction to DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim offender). Now the narc is the poor misunderstood victim who was innocently JUST JOKING! What's wrong with Mari? She's too sensitive! She can't take a joke? He then proceeds to prove that he started it. Instead of apologizing he doubles down by mocking his victim for being hurt.
Pranking. Narcissist parents will set a child up to fall and then laugh like hyenas. These are the ones who shove cake in their kid's face at her birthday party. Or leap out to scare her and make her cry. Or who start food fights like frat boys. Which having made the comparison, some of their pranks are more like hazing. My mom would look on approvingly while her boyfriend (later husband) pinched my little finger in such a way that he almost broke it. It felt like he did. He'd say "holler Uncle" or I won't quit. Child abuse passed off as a game. So disturbing. Out of the blue, my mother threw a pie in my face and at one of my children at her company work party. The only one laughing was her jackass husband. And that led to...
Vengeance jokes The narcissist parent in her entitled arrogance, is the only one allowed to mock. If his target should turn the joke back on him or even if it just accidentally backfires, look out. A humiliated narcissist is terrifying. This is where the mask slips, revealing unbridled malicious cruelty. In the pie throwing incident, my narcissist mother's coworkers didn't respond as she expected. Because they were adults not immature exhibitionist attention-seekers. Instead of laughing, they looked disdainfully. She was reprimanded and oh she did not like that. Her "jokes got even more caustic to punish me for accidentally showing up the egg on her face. This is where shit like revenge porn comes from.
Terror taunting. Also called fear baiting. So here's where we veer completely off the path of humor to viciousness. This is kind of like revenge joking but more targeted. If the victim actually hits back the narcissist comes out swinging. But being cowardly, they do it in a passive-aggressive way which they call joking. But their jokes have sharp barbs and feel a lot like attacks. My dad would laugh while the rage glittered in his eyes. He was slobbering with fury and would say deadly serious things in a terrifyingly jocular way. He once threw a knife across the room with a smile on his face. I don't even know the words for this.
Sexual harassment and dirty jokes. My mom and her husband used to tell dirty jokes around me from the time I was 9 or 10. She laughed when he made fun of my "queer" cat who "humped" balls of yarn (his words). They'd mock me because I didn't understand the crude references. She laughed along and preened when he called me "Blisters" to mock my small breasts. (all while calling herself a Christian minister and thumping her Bible, but I digress) Then they kicked me out of the house for not being able to prevent a stalker stalking me. So worried about me they made me homeless. It made me feel so gross, like I was the dirty one. I struggled for a long time with intrusive thoughts of sex that I couldn't understand. Not fantasies of it but aversions to it. I never really understand what was wrong till one day, I finally heard what my husband was saying all along how they were the pervy-creepy-deviants and I was just a child caught up in their moral depravity.
For all their sick humor, narcissists can't take a genuine joke. They personalize everything. If ever my dad felt uncomfortable about himself, he assumed it was someone's fault. He would rant about how everyone was soooo hard on poor Jack. Jack who loved making others feel small. Jack who was the first to tell my how I was too sensitive was a snowflake that melted at the first breath. My mother was a paranoid mess. My stepmother was enraged when I invited a friend to dinner that I cooked and cleaned up after because I forgot to ask her. She didn't want the friend seeing how she made me slave.
My mom's husband started nailing me and my then boyfriend with snowballs. He packed them with ice and they hit hard and hurt and he cackled. When my husband threw a snowball back and it accidentally landed in the truck, stepdaddy dearest went ballistic. I guess hurting people was fine but getting snow in a truck was not. He would not speak to us for months. Over a damn snowball fight he started. Narcissists have a self-serving sense of humor in which they are the ones laughing at others' expense. They can dish it out but they cannot take it.
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