What does black humor mean?

In the Encyclopedia Britannica, the explanation of black humor is: a kind of desperate humor, trying to attract people's laughter as a response to the obvious meaningless and absurd human life.

Black humor is a literary method to express tragic content in the form of comedy. "Black" stands for death, which is a terrible and funny reality, and "humor" is a cynical attitude of a willing individual to this reality. Adding black to humor becomes desperate humor. This school of writers mobilizes all the artistic techniques that can be mobilized to enlarge and distort the funny, ugly, deformed and dark world around them, making it even more absurd.

The school of "black humor" is a very important school in western modernist literature, which has a wide and profound influence on modern world literature. His works such as Catch-22, Gravitational Rainbow, Tobacco Agent and Slaughterhouse Five are the most influential and representative works of black humor school.

Novelists with "black humor" highlight the absurdity of the world around the characters and the oppression of individuals by society, express the disharmony between the environment and individuals (that is, "self") with helpless irony, and amplify and distort this disharmony, making it more absurd and ridiculous, and at the same time making people feel heavy and depressed.

Extended data

The origin of the school of "black humor";

As early as the 1920s, André Breton, a French surrealist, wrote a book called Collection of Black Humor. In the American literary world in the 1960s, many writers showed similarities in their creative styles: single-dimensional personality, intentional separation of characters and feelings, absurdity, abnormal handling of tragic materials, and fragmented narrative structure; A clear understanding of unreliable reality and a detached wait-and-see; Regardless of good and evil, imitation, ridicule and so on. They attracted the attention of readers and critics.

1965, American writer Bruce Jay Friedman compiled the works of 12 writers with black humor style published in American newspapers and periodicals since 1960s into a small book and published it, named Black Humor. These writers did not have an assembly or association, nor did they have the same program or manifesto, but their works appeared in the American literary world at that time with a similar appearance.

In the same year, Nick Burke, an American critic, published the article "Humor with Fatal Sting", which clearly called such writers "black humor", so the modernist literary school named after "black humor" was born in the United States. Although the development of this literary school is not smooth sailing, its influence is far-reaching, and many works are still emerging.

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