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It's more like a primal satisfaction in seeing someone worse off than us, morbid fascination (like staring at a car wreck you pass by on the highway), and a facet of a larger desire to experience a wide range of emotions in what may be a dull life. Hilarity, extasy, love, anger, terror--many of these things are experienced to a great degree by a great many people only through entertainment mediums, rather than direct experience.
If the people you know mostly focus on witnessing and cataloging tragedy, then you need to get a new set of people. This is usually a symptom of neurosis or paranoia. I'm not a psychiatrist, but I do speak from experience in this regard.
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