Black
comedy
Black comedy, also known as black humor, is a subgenre of
comedy and satire where topics and events normally treated
seriously – death, mass murder, sickness, madness, terror,
drug abuse, rape, etc. – are treated in a humorous or
satirical manner. Synonyms created to avoid possible racial
overtones include dark humor, morbid humor, gallows humor
and off-color humor
Black humor is similar to sick humor, such as dead body jokes.
However, in sick humor most of the humor comes from shock
and revulsion; black humor usually includes an element of
irony, or even fatalism. This particular brand of humor can
be exemplified by a scene in the play Waiting for Godot: A
man takes off his belt to hang himself, and his trousers fall
down. Another example, "Suicide just isn't funny, no
matter which way you slice it," is an effective satire
at the way that suicide is treated in mainstream western culture,
insinuating that attitudes towards suicide are even more morose
or morbid than the act or mental condition leading to it.
In America, black comedy as a literary genre came to prominence
in the 1950s and 1960s. Writers such as Terry Southern, Joseph
Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Harlan Ellison and
Eric Nicol have written and published novels, stories and
plays where profound or horrific events were portrayed in
a comic manner. An anthology edited by Bruce Jay Friedman,
titled "Black Humor," assembles many examples of
the genre.
The 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love the Bomb presents one of the most well-known examples
of black comedy. The subject of the film is nuclear war and
the extinction of life on Earth. Normally, dramas about nuclear
war treat the subject with gravity and seriousness, creating
suspense over the efforts to avoid a nuclear war. But Dr.
Strangelove plays the subject for laughs; for example, in
the film, the fail-safe procedures designed to prevent a nuclear
war are precisely the systems that ensure that it will happen.
The film Fail-Safe, produced simultaneously, tells a largely
identical story with a distinctly grave tone; the film The
Bed-Sitting Room, released six years later, treats post-nuclear
English society in an even wilder comic approach.
Today, black comedy can be found in almost all forms of media.
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