Dark humor

• 1. Introduction

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  Saint Lawrence was being burned alive on a rotisserie, and he had a line ready. "Turn me over. I'm done on this side," he is said to have quipped during his own execution. That joke made him the patron saint of comedians, and the patron saint of chefs too. This is the territory of dark humor, a style of comedy that makes light of subject matter generally considered taboo. It reaches for the subjects that are normally too serious or too painful to discuss out loud. The aim is not only amusement. Dark humor sets out to provoke discomfort and serious thought at the same time. So how did a French Surrealist end up giving this instinct a name? Why do police officers and funeral directors lean on it to get through a shift? And what does it mean that the people who laugh hardest at the bleakest jokes may be the calmest in the room?

• 2. Coining The Term

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  André Breton, the Surrealist theorist, coined the term black humor in 1935, taking it from the French humour noir. He arrived at it while interpreting the writings of Jonathan Swift. Breton wanted to single out some of Swift's work as a subgenre of comedy and satire, one where laughter rises from cynicism and skepticism and often leans on the topic of death. He carried the term into his 1940 book, Anthology of Black Humor, or Anthologie de l'humour noir. There he credited Swift as the originator of both black humor and gallows humor. He pointed to Swift's Directions to Servants from 1731, A Modest Proposal from 1729, Meditation Upon a Broomstick from 1710, and a handful of aphorisms. Breton did not stop at Swift. His book gathered excerpts from 45 other writers. Some passages drew their wit from a victim the audience empathizes with, the usual shape of gallows humor. Others used comedy to mock the victim instead, trivializing the suffering so that the reader sympathizes with the victimizer. Breton found that second, crueler mode in the social criticism of the Marquis de Sade.

• 3. What It Is Not

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  Blue comedy is the easiest thing to mistake for dark humor, and the two are not the same. Blue comedy focuses on nudity, sex, and body fluids, while dark humor reaches for subjects considered taboo for being serious or painful. Dark humor is also distinct from plain obscenity. Gallows humor sits inside the larger family but stays narrow in its focus. The term tends to be used specifically for death, or for situations that are reminiscent of dying. Dark humor, by contrast, is a relatively broad term covering many serious subjects at once. The grotesque genre offers another point of contact, and dark humor can occasionally be related to it. The lineage runs deep into the past. Literary critics have associated black comedy with authors as early as the ancient Greeks, naming Aristophanes among them.

• 4. The American Anthology

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  Bruce Jay Friedman put the idea in front of the whole country in 1965, with a mass-market paperback simply titled Black Humor. It was one of the first American anthologies devoted to black humor as a literary genre. Friedman used it to label a wide range of authors as "black humorists." His list included J. P. Donleavy, Edward Albee, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Vladimir Nabokov, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Friedman himself. Nathanael West and Nabokov were among the first American writers to employ black comedy in their work. Later journalists and critics extended the label to a new set of names: Roald Dahl, Kurt Vonnegut, Warren Zevon, Christopher Durang, Philip Roth, and Veikko Huovinen. Evelyn Waugh earned a particular distinction, called "the first contemporary writer to produce the sustained black comic novel." The thread tying them together is that they portrayed profound or horrific events in a comic manner, across novels, poems, stories, plays, and songs. Lenny Bruce, branded since the late 1950s as a practitioner of "sick comedy" by mainstream journalists, was later folded into the black comedy label too.

• 5. The Mind At Work

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  Sigmund Freud, in his 1927 essay Humor, or Der Humor, never used the phrase black humor, but he cited a literal case of gallows humor. Then he wrote a line about the resilient self. "The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer," he observed. The ego insists it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world, treating those traumas as mere occasions to gain pleasure. Paul Lewis adds a warning to this picture of relief. Whether a gallows joke truly relieves depends on context, on whether the threatened person tells the joke themselves or someone else tells it for them. Wylie Sypher framed the deeper payoff in plain terms. "To be able to laugh at evil and error means we have surmounted them," he wrote. Black comedy carries a social charge along these lines. It strengthens the morale of the oppressed while it undermines the morale of the oppressors.

• 6. A European Inheritance

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  Galgenhumor is the German expression that captures the genre, meaning the cynical last words spoken before getting hanged. Black comedy is a natural human instinct, and examples of it turn up in stories from antiquity. Its use was widespread in middle Europe, and from there it was imported to the United States. The same impulse echoes in the French expression rire jaune, literally yellow laughing, which has a Germanic counterpart in the Belgian Dutch groen lachen, literally green laughing. Daniele Luttazzi, the Italian comedian, examined this particular laughter, the risata verde or groen lachen. He argued that grotesque satire, rather than ironic satire, is the kind that most often arouses it. He located its heyday in the Kabaretts of the Weimar era, where the genre was especially common. Among its major masters, Luttazzi named Karl Valentin and Karl Kraus.

• 7. A Coping Mechanism

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  Police officers, firefighters, and ambulance crews trade in this kind of joke because their work hands them dark subject matter every day. Black comedy is common across professions that routinely confront the grim and the painful. The same holds for military personnel, journalists, lawyers, and funeral directors, where it stands as an acknowledged coping mechanism. There is a caution attached to it. Workers are encouraged to note the context in which these jokes are told, because outsiders may not react the way that those with mutual knowledge do. A 2017 study in the journal Cognitive Processing turned the lens on the listeners themselves. It concluded that people who appreciate dark humor may have higher IQs, show lower aggression, and resist negative feelings more effectively than those who turn up their noses at it.