Black comedy
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Black comedy is a sub-genre of comedy and satire in which topics and events that are usually regarded as taboo are treated in a satirical or humorous manner while retaining its seriousness.
Synonyms include dark comedy, black humor, dark humor, and morbid humor.
[edit] Humor
The purpose of black comedy is to make light of serious and often taboo subject matter, and some comedians use it as a tool for exploring important issues, thus provoking discomfort and serious thought, as well as amusement, in their audience. Popular themes of the genre include rape, murder, suicide, war, terminal illness, abuse, insanity, disease and crime. By contrast, so-called blue comedy focuses more on crude topics, such as sex and bodily fluids.
Although the two are interrelated, black comedy is different from straightforward obscenity, in that it is more subtle and doesn't necessarily have an explicit intention to offend; it is often undercut by irony and fatalism, a popular example Black comedy should be contrasted with obscenity. In obscene humor, 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.
Writers such as William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Twain, and George Bernard Shaw, have written and published novels, stories, plays and songs where profound or horrific events were portrayed in a comic manner. Comedians including George Carlin and the Monty Python team have also helped popularise the genre.
[edit] Genre
In America, black comedy as a literary genre came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. An anthology edited by Bruce Jay Friedman, titled Black Humor, assembles many examples of the genre.
According to screenwriter John Truby, when black comedy is used as a basis for a story's plotline, it involves a society in an unhealthy state and a main character wanting something which, for whatever reason, is not a thing that will be beneficial to himself or society. The audience should usually be able to see this for themselves, and often a supporting character within the story also sees the insanity of the situation. The main character rarely if ever learns a lesson or undergoes any significant change from the ordeal, but sometimes a relatively sane course of action is offered to them.
Black comedy is a prevalent theme of many cult films, television shows and video games. The 1964 film Dr. Strangelove presents one of the best-known mainstream examples of black comedy. The subject of the film is nuclear warfare and the annihilation 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. Plotwise, Group Captain Mandrake serves as the one sane character in the decayed society, and Major Kong fills the role of the hero striving for a harmful goal.
In modern standards, black comedy is commonly used in dramatic or satirical films retaining its serious tone. Examples include The Twelve Chairs, Catch Me If You Can, W., Network, Natural Born Killers and sometimes family-oriented films like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
