I think you're taking it a little seriously - I would never be in favor of doing these things in reality, and if someone did, I would be disgusted with them. Kind of like how the idea of torturing someone by gouging their eyes out with a spork might be a little funny in the abstract, but if I or anyone I knew actually had their eyes gouged out with a spork, it would be an extremely serious matter. I think the fundamental logical idea is simply "laughing at suffering", whether that is the suffering of awkwardness, the suffering of insanity, the suffering of torture, whatever. The topic of whether that suffering is funny only in an abstract sense is a different topic. I think in the case I referred to, it's funny precisely because it is so absurd - because we all have wondered insane things, but then we pass them off as being impossible. The humor in driving people insane is the subversion of expectation - in that in this case, the insane narrative happens to be the one that is true (namely, that some super rich person meticulously scatters absurdities, or extreme coincidences throughout your life, as a strange sort of performance art). So I would beg to differ, in that it is laughing at the absurdity of life, in so far as one laughs at the meta-absurdity of the oft-discounted and patently absurd narrative a schizophrenic might believe, actually being the reasonable narrative, which is in itself absurd.

Also, I'm pretty sure the "guests" on the Eric Andre show subway skits aren't in on the joke - though on his interview skits, definitely.