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black humour, in literature, a kind of desperate humour that seeks to induce laughter as the ultimate human response to the apparent meaninglessness and absurdity of existence. Although the term black humour is a development of the 20th century, bitter humour has its roots in the extravagant satires of the 5th-century-BC Greek comedy writer Aristophanes, the picaresque tales of the Renaissance, and the satirical fables of the Age of Reason. Francois Rabelais used the techniques of black humour in his fantastic history of Pantagruel (1532), as did Cervantes in his tale of the mad but noble Don Quixote (1605). A more pessimistic vision of mankind darkens the comedy of Jonathan Swift’s Gui- liver’s Travels (1726), and the blackest of humour is at work in the horrendous yet hilarious misfortunes that befall Voltaire’s Candide (1759) in this “best of all possible worlds.”
Modern black humorists share the earlier satirists’ acute awareness of the vice and folly of mankind, combined with the atheistic existentialist belief that there is no God or higher authority to make sense of the human condition. For those with such an outlook on life, there are only three responses: a cynical acceptance and exploitation of the absence of values; withdrawal and despair; or defiant laughter. Whereas the satirist exposes human foolishness, wickedness, and misfortune in hopes of curing them, the black humorist offers his dark comic vision of laughing at his predicament so that the reader may rise above
it.
An early-2Oth-century black humorist was the French writer Louis-Ferdinand C?line, who shocked the literary world with his Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey to the End of the Night, 1934), a savagely misanthropic work that nonetheless wrenched sardonic laughter from its readers. Nathanael West used black comedy in such novels as Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), A Cool Million (1934), and The Day of the Locust (1939), in which he revealed the American dream of liberty and the pursuit of happiness corrupted and distorted by a venal, selfish society.
In England, Evelyn Waugh created what might be called the black comedy of manners in such witty yet bitingly satirical novels as Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1937), and The Loved One (1948), a satire on U.S. attitudes toward death.
Many later writers of black humour acquired their dark comic vision from their experiences in World War II, notably Joseph Heller, who flew more than 60 combat missions over Italy and France, an experience that provided material for his novel Catch-22 (1961), a powerful attack on the dehumanizing military bureaucracy and U.S. entrepreneurial greed. Kurt Vonnegut, who survived the firebombing holocaust of Dresden while a prisoner in Germany, delivered a scathing attack on 20th- century man’s love of war in his Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). In an earlier novel, Cat’s Cradle (1963), Vonnegut ridiculed the “truths” of both science and religion, concluding that mankind is better off living by “foma,” or harmless untruths. A devastating anti-war film was Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1963), a comedy of militaristic errors that ends in global nuclear explosions. In Terry Southern’s novel The Magic Christian (1959), Guy Grand, the fabulously wealthy hero, acts as a kind of scourge of God, playing vast practical jokes that expose the venality of his contemporaries. John Barth’s black humour appeared in The Sot- Weed Factor (1960), a bawdy burlesque of U.S. colonial history, and Giles Goat-Boy (1966), a satire taking place in two huge universities. Other writers sometimes associated with black humour are playwright Edward Albee and novelists Bruce Jay Friedman, John Hawkes, Thomas Pynchon, and Ireland’s J.P. Donleavy.
