Humor is definitely a way of coping with a situation that would otherwise be unbearable.

The judge in the Ed Gein case wrote a book shortly after Gein was committed to a mental institution and included a long chapter (by a shrink, as I remember) on humor as a coping device -- and a compendium of "Ed Gein" jokes (all of which were revived each time he came up for a sanity hearing and were revived and modified after Jeffrey Dahmer's crimes were revealed).

Linn