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{{dablink|This article is about a tone of comedy. For information about U.S. film and TV comedies featuring African or African-American characters, see ] and ]. For Shakespeare's dark comedies, see ].}} {{dablink|This article is about a tone of comedy. For information about U.S. film and TV comedies featuring African or African-American characters, see ] and ]. For Shakespeare's dark comedies, see ]. For the one-act play, see ].}}


'''Black comedy''', also known as '''black humor''', is a subgenre of ] and ] where topics and events normally treated seriously – ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ] – are treated in a humorous or satirical manner. Synonyms created to avoid possible racial overtones include '''dark comedy/humor''', '''morbid comedy/humor''' and ''']''' (see also ].) A scene in ]'s play '']'' demonstrates black comedy well: a man takes off his belt to hang himself, and his trousers fall down. '''Black comedy''', also known as '''black humor''', is a subgenre of ] and ] where topics and events normally treated seriously – ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ] – are treated in a humorous or satirical manner. Synonyms created to avoid possible racial overtones include '''dark comedy/humor''', '''morbid comedy/humor''' and ''']''' (see also ].) A scene in ]'s play '']'' demonstrates black comedy well: a man takes off his belt to hang himself, and his trousers fall down.

Revision as of 18:19, 14 December 2005

This article is about a tone of comedy. For information about U.S. film and TV comedies featuring African or African-American characters, see Blaxploitation and Black sitcom. For Shakespeare's dark comedies, see Problem plays. For the one-act play, see Black Comedy.

Black comedy, also known as black humor, is a subgenre of comedy and satire where topics and events normally treated seriously – death, mass murder, sickness, madness, terror, drug abuse, rape, etc. – are treated in a humorous or satirical manner. Synonyms created to avoid possible racial overtones include dark comedy/humor, morbid comedy/humor and off-color humor (see also color metaphors for race.) A scene in Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot demonstrates black comedy well: a man takes off his belt to hang himself, and his trousers fall down.

Black humor is similar to sick humor, such as dead baby jokes. However, in sick humor most of the humor comes from shock and revulsion; black humor usually includes an element of irony, or even fatalism.

In America, black comedy as a literary genre came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. Writers such as Terry Southern, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Harlan Ellison and Eric Nicol have written and published novels, stories and plays where profound or horrific events were portrayed in a comic manner. An anthology edited by Bruce Jay Friedman, titled "Black Humor," assembles many examples of the genre.

The 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb presents one of the most well-known examples of black comedy. The subject of the film is nuclear war and the extinction 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 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. The film Fail-Safe, produced simultaneously, tells a largely identical story with a distinctly grave tone; the film The Bed-Sitting Room, released six years later, treats post-nuclear English society in an even wilder comic approach.

Today, black comedy can be found in almost all forms of media. The worst examples are shallow attempts at grabbing attention with shock value, coating otherwise uninteresting content with a veneer of hip edgy-ness. The best examples are works of high satire that tell us something profound about ourselves and the world we live in.

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