Black_Humor.pptVIP

Black Humor Black humor is an important literary term of America in 1960’s.The word black humor comes from a name of a book, which is written by B.J. Friedman. Black humor refers primarily to a kind of bitter and often outrageous satire. Much black humor is directed against greed, narrow-mindedness, complacency, and hypocrisy. Black humor frequently satirizes societys institutions, including government bureaucracies, the military, and large corporations, depicting them as dehumanizing organizations. Black humorists often attack the absurdity they see in life itself, as well as societys ills. The awareness of human mortality is basic to black humor, giving many of the works a desperate, even hopeless attitude. Black humor as a movement became prominent in the 1960s. But critics have found elements of black humor in the writings of the English author Jonathan Swift and the French philosopher Voltaire in the 1700s and in the writings of some earlier authors. Features of black humor appear in the theater of the absurd, an experimental drama movement that emerged in France in the 1950s. A number of American writers have been called black humorists, including Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut. A number of comedians deal in material that can be called black humor. black humor used to express the absurdity, insensitivity, paradox, and cruelty of the modern world. Ordinary characters or situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of normal satire or irony. Black humor uses devices often associated with tragedy and is sometimes equated with tragic farce. On the whole, black humor is a comedy, but it is also a sick comedy with tragedy. Sample 1 Dong Cunrui went to the heaven after he died. God asked:” Why did you died?” Dong Cunrui answered :”I was killed by a detonator when I dynamited a pillbox.” God was very angry:” Nonsense! How dare you cheat me?” Dong said:” I don’t cheat you.” God said:” You believed that I hadn’t know the science? As everyone known