Black comedy , also known as black humor , bleak comedy , dark comedy , dark humor , gallows humor or morbid humor , is a style of comedy that makes light of subject matter that is generally considered taboo , particularly subjects that are normally considered serious or painful to discuss.
Writers and comedians often use it as a tool for exploring vulgar issues by provoking discomfort, serious thought, and amusement for their audience.
Thus, in fiction , for example, the term black comedy can also refer to a genre in which dark humor is a core component. Cartoonist Charles Addams was famous for such humor, e. Black comedy differs from both blue comedy —which focuses more on crude topics such as nudity , sex , and body fluids —and from straightforward obscenity.
Whereas the term black comedy is a relatively broad term covering humor relating to many serious subjects, gallows humor tends to be used more specifically in relation to death, or situations that are reminiscent of dying. Black humor can occasionally be related to the grotesque genre. Breton coined the term for his book Anthology of Black Humor Anthologie de l'humour noir , in which he credited Jonathan Swift as the originator of black humor and gallows humor particularly in his pieces Directions to Servants , A Modest Proposal , Meditation Upon a Broomstick , and in a few aphorisms.
In the last cases, the victim's suffering is trivialized, which leads to sympathizing with the victimizer, as analogously found in the social commentary and social criticism of the writings of for instance Sade. Among the first American writers who employed black comedy in their works were Nathanael West and Vladimir Nabokov. With the paperback, Friedman labeled as "black humorists" a variety of authors, such as J. Comedians like Lenny Bruce , [ 11 ] who since the late s have been labeled as using " sick comedy " by mainstream journalists, have also been labeled with "black comedy".
