Black Humor

The black humor is a form of Humor which underlines with cruelty, bitterness and sometimes despair the nonsense of the world, face to which it constitutes a form of defense. It in particular consists in evoking with detachment, even with recreation, the things most horrible or most contrary with morals of use. It established a contrast between the character upsetting or tragic of that which one speaks and the way in which one speaks about it. This contrast challenges the reader or the listener and has vocation to cause an interrogation. It is in what the black humor, which makes laugh or smile of the most serious things, is potentially a weapon of subversion. Fatalism, pathetic impresses by certain sides, this humor is inevitably a source of embarrassment. Besides some present this embarrassment like one of its springs, insofar as the laughter which it causes must obstruct, to even give shame, to make hesitate that which laughs at it between its natural reaction, the laughter, and its reflected reaction, the horror or the dislike. According to the cultures it evolves/moves between despair and mocking remark and will be more or less accepted according to the force of the taboos that it titillates.

But black humor does not have taboos, by definition it is its ground of predilection. And, One should not confuse black humor and mockery, humor, even black, remaining a flash of wit, which prefers laughter of the things not to have not to cry about it.

It is often believed that black humor is a " spécialité" English, but this form of humor has its roots in the United States, and it is known as that Mark Twain, writer and humorist, would be the father of the line.

Quotations and examples

Humor is like the coffee: better very black| Bertrand Cèbe |

Black humor, it is the courtesy of despair| Oscar Wilde |

One can laugh at all, but not with everyone. | Pierre Desproges

Let us live happy while waiting for death| Pierre Desproges

One can, one must laugh at all: war, misery and death. With is the remainder, it obstructed, it, Death, to laugh itself at us? | Pierre Desproges

I know an ugly chick, it made a kid with a guy even uglier than it, they were obliged to throw it! | Coluche

The rise of the oil price makes fear to the driving handicapped people| Coluche

You like your mother? Then take again an end| Pierre Dory |

Artists

Magazines: Charlie-Hebdo, Hara-Kiri…
the Grand Prix of Black Humor is decreed each year to reward the best books and drawings for black humor.

Writers

Draftsmen

Humorists

Realizers

Dialogists

Henri Jeanson

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