Black Humor

Black comedy or dark comedy is a comic style that makes light of subjects that are generally considered serious or taboo. Literary critics have associated black comedy and black humor with authors as early as the ancient Greeks with Aristophanes. Black comedy corresponds to the earlier concept of gallows humor.

The term black humor (from the French humour noir) was coined by the surrealist theorist André Breton in 1935 while interpreting the writings of Jonathan Swift. Breton's preference was to identify some of Swift's writings as a subgenre of comedy and satire in which laughter arises from cynicism and skepticism, often relying on topics such as death. Scholars have associated black humor with authors as early as the ancient Greeks with Aristophanes.

Breton coined the term for his book Anthology of Black Humor (Anthologie de l'humour noir), in which he credited Jonathan Swift as the originator of black humor and gallows humor, and included excerpts from 45 other writers. Breton included both examples in which the wit arises from a victim with which the audience empathizes, as is more typical in the tradition of gallows humor, and examples in which the comedy is used to mock the victim. This victim's suffering is trivialized, which leads to sympathizing with the victimizer, as analogously found in the social commentary and social criticism of the writings of Sade. Black humor is also occasionally related to that of the grotesque genre.

Breton identified Swift as the originator of black humor and gallows humor, particularly in his pieces Directions to Servants (1731), A Modest Proposal (1729), A Meditation Upon a Broom-Stick (1710), and a few aphorisms.

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