What is a cold joke? What is black humor?

[Edit this paragraph] Definition of cold jokes

Definition: 1: It means that this person is quite calm and basically expressionless. After listening to it, the listener should be stunned and think about it before he feels funny.

Definition 2: Cold jokes generally go beyond conventional thinking, do not conform to logic and real life, and make people feel dumbfounded; Although some cold jokes are quite funny, they will not laugh like those who listen to "normal" jokes anyway; A joke that is not funny at all, a boring joke, can achieve the purpose of mental relaxation, because such jokes are not easy to understand; Brainstorming is a cold joke. Especially idioms borrowed from homophones and English, as well as puzzles such as peanuts and recent flowers.

Definition 3: Cold jokes are actually jokes that are not funny at all. They are boring jokes, but they can achieve the purpose of mental relaxation, because they are easy to understand without thinking, but they can have a long aftertaste.

Definition 4: Cold jokes refer to jokes that make people feel different from ordinary jokes and are difficult to laugh because of homophonic words, translation, subject ellipsis, logic, judgment, special content and other reasons, or because of the performer's tone or expression. A cold joke doesn't mean it's not funny, it's also a manifestation of humor. Sometimes a cold joke is not funny, which is also one of the jokes.

Definition 5: Cold jokes (Hong Kong is called bad gag, Taiwan Province is called bad stem) are a kind of failed jokes. It means that the original funny joke can't achieve the funny purpose and it's hard to make people laugh, but it doesn't mean that the joke itself is boring because of homophonic words, translation, subject omission, different logic, special judgment and content, or because of the performer's tone or expression. Nowadays, most people laugh when they hear cold jokes, and sometimes they make a gesture of hugging their arms: "It's so cold!" " Or words and expressions related to cold semantics, such as chills, temperature, air conditioning or hot weather.

Some cold jokes are just because of performance problems. After redesigning the performance, many nuances can be found. Sometimes suggesting that a cold joke is not funny is another joke (and at the same time, it is simple and good to reverse the atmosphere). Cold jokes are now widely popular in the internet, BBS, TV programs (variety shows), books, magazines and other media, and there are many experts in cold jokes.

black humor

Black humor, English name: Black Humor

Schools of modern American literature. It was popular in the middle and late 1960s. 1965, Friedman compiled the works of 12 writers into a collection of short stories entitled Black Humor, hence the name of this genre. Black humorous stories strive to highlight the absurdity and coldness of living environment, satirize and attack traditional values and aesthetic concepts, and show the alienation of the world, the fall of human nature and the broken feelings. Some critics call it "humor under the gallows" or "joke before disaster". Black humor is anti-rational and anti-idealistic literature.

After the rise of "black humor" literature in the early 1960s, it quickly became one of the important literary schools in the United States and even the whole West. The reason why it can get social attention lies not only in its profound ideological connotation and aesthetic value, but also in its originality in creative techniques. Taken together, it has the following artistic characteristics.

First, a particularly humorous style. Black humor is different from humor in traditional literature. In western traditional literature, generally speaking, the distinction between tragedy and comedy is very clear. Comedy satirizes the ugliness and deformity of the villain, while tragedy shows the pain and misfortune of the positive protagonist. However, the "black humor" literature broke this boundary, and the content of tragedy adopted the artistic technique of comedy, and the pain and misfortune also became the object of jokes, that is, the content of tragedy was expressed in the form of comedy. This introduces a new factor into the aesthetic form of traditional humor: thinking that pain is ridiculous and taking a mocking attitude towards misfortune. The irony and satire of "black humor" is very implicit and allegorical. The author did not make a clear moral and political evaluation, but let readers understand some hidden meanings from these cold humor and comedy laughter. Writers do not stick to the traditional methods of describing reality. They always look at and reflect the world with magnifying glasses and mirrors, and express objective things with infinitely exaggerated brushstrokes, thus expanding and deforming them and making those dark and ugly things more prominent, disgusting and ridiculous. Although the writer holds a cold-eyed and uncritical attitude, readers can appreciate the profound meaning in their thinking and aftertaste. Second, "anti-hero" characters. These anti-hero images doubt and deny all traditional values, have a sense of loneliness that everyone is drunk and I am awake alone, and also have certain pursuits. These characters often laugh at what they respect, destroy what they have achieved, deny what they have affirmed and protest what they have accepted. For example, Billy, the hero of vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, is a crazy character. Heller's Doctrine of Catch-22 Yossarian is a humble, wretched and afraid of death, and a man with abnormal nerves. Alderman believes that these people are "forced to play the role of clowns". The soil that produces such morbid deformed figures is a morbid deformed society.

Thirdly, the narrative structure method of "anti-fiction". Traditional novels adopt the narrative method of "telling stories", which generally has a complete story structure, a beginning and an end, and the plot development should conform to the internal logical relationship. "Black humor" literature completely abandons the old storytelling method and creates a new dramatic method by using hints, contrasts, metaphors and symbols. It breaks the limitation of time and space and exaggerates the vastness of the inner world of the characters; It is no longer limited by time and space, and can transcend society, morality, customs and concepts. The novel has no structure, no complete story, and certainly no strict structure. This clearly shows several characteristics of this kind of novels in structure: it often adopts "time execution technique" to break the conventional concept of time and space. Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five is a model of "time travel", and the activities of the characters in the novel are strangely intertwined with the past, present and future, changing rapidly. At first glance, it is confusing, dazzling and confusing. In fact, this is a special structure that goes hand in hand at multiple levels, which is useful for the rapid development of the story and the deepening of the theme. Another feature of the structure is that change and development are replaced by reinforcement and repetition. Generally speaking, in traditional novels, the cause, development and ending of events are clearly written, but in "black humor" novels, it is not. It is not a routine explanation, but the plot of the characters in the work is reversed. For example, "Catch-22" describes that a person is dead and alive, born and dead. This has never happened in traditional literature and is not allowed. But it can be seen everywhere in "black humor" novels. This is just as vonnegut said: "Let others give chaos, and I will give chaos." Traditional writers can grasp the broad social picture, arrange thousands of messy things in an orderly way, and form articles with strict structure and distinct levels. Black humorists, on the other hand, put the cart before the horse and "messed up the order", mixing humorous things with lofty and serious things, comedy factors and tragedy factors to form a completely new cultural structure.

Fourth, special themes. In order to keep consistent with the overall theme of "black humor", writers are also different from traditional novels in material selection. It is embodied in two aspects: one is to explore the theme of science and technology. The authors of "black humor" are mostly university teachers. They are knowledgeable and like to introduce the essence of natural science into literary works. For example, Pynchon's Gravity Rainbow is the trajectory of missile launch; Vonnegut believes that the struggle comes from the "dynamic tension" in Cat's Cradle and the harmful chemicals in the brain in Breakfast of Champions. Secondly, "black humor" writers like to choose special scenes with unclear meaning, vacillation, waking from a dream and looking at flowers in the fog. For example, Pynchon's Gravitational Rainbow and Heller's Catch-22 are both set in World War II, but the author's intention is not to write a "war novel" or describe World War II sincerely, but to enlighten people and let them see the law of the jungle in contemporary society from these novels.