Black Humor

Black humor disturbs because it is not necessarily nor always light-hearted, funny, amusing, laughter-arousing. Furthermore, black humor seems to have little respect for the values and patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that have kept Anglo-American culture stable and effective, have provided a basis of equilibrium for society and the individual.  Black humor violates sacred and secular taboos alike without restraint or compunction.  It discovers cause for laughter in what has generally been regarded as too serious for frivolity:  the death of men, the disintegration or social institutions, mental and physical disease, deformity, suffering, anguish, privation and terror.

Humor [according to André Breton, French theorist and compiler of Anthologie de l'humour noir] was a means whereby one defended the inner self against the constraints of the human condition, physical and psychological as well as social.  Humor enabled one to transcend the trivial reality in which man is imprisoned by logic, reason, and subjective emotion, freeing him to achieve union with the objective metaphysical Absolute.  Detached by humor from the determinism of the material world and from the culturally determined self, man's dark unconscious could express its metaphysical yearnings and intuitions in the form of untrammelled dream, fantasy, and non-sense.  Hence black humor.

Black humor's blackness . . . derives from its rejection of morality and other human codes ensuring earthly pattern and order, from its readiness to joke about the horror, violence, injustice, and death that rouses its indignation, from its avoidance of sentimentality by means of emotional coolness, and from its predilection for surprise and shock. -- Brom Weber, "The Mode of 'Black Humor'"

Black humor stops short of any such victory [of life over death].  It enacts no individual release or social reconciliation; it often moves toward, but ordinarily fails to reach, that goal.  Like Shakespeare's dark comedies, black humor condemns man to a dying world; it never envisions, as do Shakespeare's early and late comedies, the possibilities of human escape from an aberrant environment into a forest milieu, as a ritual of the triumph of the green world over the waste land. -- Max F. Schulz, "Toward a Definition of Black Humor"

The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience.  When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock--to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures. -- Flannery O'Connor, "The Fiction Writer and His Country"

Character Type:  Grotesques.  The term  grotesque is generally used to name a decorative style in sculpture, painting, and architecture, characterized by fantastic representations of human and animal forms often combined into formal distortions of the natural to the point of absurdity, ugliness, or caricature.  Modern literary critics often use the term to refer to a special type of writing or to kinds of characters.  In this sense, the grotesque can be seen as the merging of the comic and tragic, resulting from our loss of faith in the moral universe. 

In American literature, Sherwood Anderson, in his Winesburg, Ohio defined a grotesque character as a person who "took one of the [many] truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live by it."  Such a person, Anderson asserted, "became a grotesque and the truth he embraced a falsehood." 

 In later works, particularly by Southern writers such William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty, grotesque characters are those who are either physically or spiritually deformed and who perform abnormal actions, often to communicate allegorical statements.