It's commonly known as the lowest form of wit.

One author even scathingly refers to it as "the last refuge of the imaginatively bankrupt".

But for the Chandlers of this world who like to pepper their linguistic arsenal with a fair spray of sarcasm now and again, fear not.

A new study has found that the time-honoured mechanism of verbal irony actually helps people to become brighter and more creative.

Researchers from leading US universities Harvard and Columbia ran a series of experiments among more than 300 men and women to see how sarcastic comments (i.e. comments that deliberately state the opposite of the truth to get a laugh or make a point) affect our engagement and ability to think laterally.

In the results, published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes this week, they found that people who made sarcastic comments - and those on the receiving end of them - were up to three times more creative than their straight-playing counterparts.

This is because making and understanding sarcastic comments forces us to think more abstractly, which stimulates creativity, openness and the generation of novel ideas and new ways of problem-solving.

The lowest form of wit? Study finds sarcastic people are brighter and more creative