Black comedy

Black comedy, also known as black humour is a sub-genre of comedy and satire where topics and events that are usually treated seriously — death, mass murder, suicide, sickness, madness, fear, drug abuse, rape, war, terrorism etc. — are treated in a humorous or satirical manner. Synonyms include dark humor, morbid humour, gallows humour and off-color humour.

This type of humor is probably a result of the psychological and sociological need for a person or group of people to mentally distance themselves from disturbing events or topics. Humor is a social tool that is often used to ease and diffuse tense situations. By laughing at problems a person can ease stress and other painful emotions. For example when a person or group of people need to perform a grim and disturbing task, like clearing dead bodies from a disaster zone, then occasionally making a comment that isn't as reverent as perhaps the task requires is a thing that nearly everyone involved knows is a way of keeping the horror at bay, at maintaining some kind of even keel in such surroundings. The black humor, the need to put a certain mental distance between themselves and what they are doing, will always be ever present. It is not actually meant to be derogatory or disrespectful, even though it may sound that way to others at that moment or mostly later on, it is merely a way for any person to deal with difficult emotions by creating more pleasant ones. It is in fact a subconscious method that the human mind employs to prevent emotional and psychological traumas. It is perhaps a preventative form of self healing of the human mind.

Black comedy should be contrasted with sick humour, though the two are interrelated. In sick humour, much of the humorous element comes from shock and revulsion; black comedy usually includes an element of irony, or even fatalism. This particular brand of humor can be exemplified by a scene in the play Waiting for Godot: A man takes off his belt to hang himself, and his trousers fall down.

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 Humour," 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 best-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.