Black comedy

This article is about the genre. For situation comedies featuring a predominantly African American cast, see Black sitcom. For the play by Peter Shaffer, see Black Comedy.

Hopscotch to oblivion, Barcelona, Spain.

Black comedy or dark comedy is a sub-genre of comedy and satire in which topics and events that are usually regarded as taboo, are treated in an unusually humorous or satirical manner while retaining their seriousness. The intent of black comedy, therefore, is often for the audience to experience both laughter and discomfort, sometimes simultaneously.

Humor

Black comedy employs a form of humor that may be known as 'black humor', 'dark humor', or, if specifically relating to death, 'morbid humor' or Danolith. The purpose of black humor is to make light of serious and often taboo subject matter, and some comedians use it as a tool for exploring vulgar issues, thus provoking discomfort and serious thought as well as amusement in their audience. Popular themes of the genre include murder, suicide, war, barbarism, drug abuse, terminal illness, domestic violence, insanity, nightmare, disease, racism, disability (both physical and mental), chauvinism, corruption, and crime. By contrast, blue comedy focuses more on crude topics, such as nudity, sex and bodily fluids.

Although the two are interrelated, black comedy is different from straightforward obscenity in that it is more subtle and does not necessarily have the explicit intention of offending people. In obscene humor, much of the humorous element comes from shock and revulsion, while black comedy 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, where a man takes off his belt to hang himself and his trousers fall down.

Writers such as William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut,, Warren Zevon, Patrick Hamilton, Joseph Heller, Mark Twain, Martin McDonagh, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and George Bernard Shaw have written novels, poems, stories, plays and songs in which profound or horrific events were portrayed in a comic manner. Comedians including Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Bill Hicks, Peter Cook, Jack Dee, Frankie Boyle, and the Monty Python team have also helped popularize the genre.

Genre

Major "King" Kong riding a nuclear bomb to oblivion, from the film Dr. Strangelove.

Black comedy is commonly used in dramatic or satirical films, retaining its serious tone. The term is credited to the Anthology of Black Humour (Anthologie de l'humeur noir), a 1939 French anthology of 45 writers edited by André Breton. In the United States, black comedy as a literary genre came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. A later English-language anthology edited by Bruce Jay Friedman, titled Black Humor, assembles many examples of the genre.

Black comedy is a prevalent theme of many cult films, television shows and video games. The 1964 Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove presents one of the best-known mainstream examples of black comedy. The subject of the film is nuclear warfare and the annihilation 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 instead 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. Plotwise, Group Captain Mandrake serves as the only sane character in the film, while Major Kong fills the role of the hero striving for a harmful goal.

See also

• Comedy horror
• Crude humor
• Cringe humor
• Gallows humor
• Macabre
• Problem plays
• Schadenfreude
• Shock value
• Tom Lehrer