Humour Noir

The title term was coined by the Surrealist theorist André Breton in 1935 while interpreting the writings of Jonathan Swift. Breton’s preference was to identify some of Swift’s writings as a subgenre of comedy and satire in which laughter arises from cynicism and skepticism. wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_comedy

I forget how I first saw MAD magazine, as a pre-teen in the early 1970s but, like millions of my peers, I grokked it. It was natural that I’d eventually be a big fan of Vonnegut. He’s like the cartoon old man talking to a young man in a library: “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it,” then tells a story to illustrate his point.

Through the darkest days of the Civil War, President Lincoln used his humor to get through tough times, gently make his point with politicians and military officers, and bring cheer to disheartened citizens. He called humor “an emollient” that “saves me much friction and distress.” When asked how he could makes jokes at such serious times, he answered, “I laugh because I must not cry.”

“More than just a respite from sadness and pain, laughter gives you the courage and strength to find new sources of meaning and hope. Even in the most difficult of times, a laugh–or even simply a smile–can go a long way toward making you feel better. And laughter really is contagious—just hearing laughter primes your brain and readies you to smile and join in the fun. Laughter: stops distressing emotions; helps you relax and recharge; shifts perspective; and draws you closer to others, which can have a profound effect on all aspects of your mental & emotional health.” helpguide.org/mental-health/wellbeing/laughter-is-the-best-medicine

“Through the use of both comedy and tragedy being portrayed through morbid satire, dark humor allows us as a nation to observe our flaws and understand the mistakes we make, in order to not make the same ones again, or change the way society deals with them.” ipl.org/essay/Dark-Humor-And-Satire-In-Pulp-Fiction-PCREWPTYV

Excerpted from “Vonnegut's Sense of Humor” by Peter C. Kunze & Robert T. Tally Jr: “Kurt Vonnegut is perhaps best known as a humorist, and his speeches especially were often laugh riots. But he is most beloved, it seems, for a form of bittersweet humor that does not generally elicit belly-laughs so much as knowing smiles or grim chuckles. For this reason he is sometimes thought of as ‘black humorist’, but it seems more apt to view Vonnegut as a frustrated idealist, someone who used humor to combat his own sense of the absurd, who ‘laughed to keep from crying’, and who found that the most appropriate form of social satire was to poke gentle fun…as we know from his own later writings—such as Timequake (1997) and A Man Without a Country (2005)—and from Shields's biography, Vonnegut was deeply troubled about both his country and his career. He felt that things in the United States and in the world were continuing to worsen, and that his own legacy was irrelevant…He was despondent about the general ineffectiveness of art within the decadent American civilization he chronicled in his fiction. As he put it in Fates Worse Than Death, in reference to Abby Hoffman's anti-war ‘clowning’ in the 1960s, ‘almost all American artists of every sort were opposed to the war, forming a sort of laser beam of moral outrage. The power of this beam…turned out to be equivalent to that of a banana cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder four feet high’ (pp189-190)…

“His funniest novel, Cat's Cradle, which was intentionally constructed in such a way that each chapter functioned as its own discrete joke, complete with a little punch line at the end, is also one of the most pathetic (meaning, here, filled with pathos). The humor is rooted in this sense of the absurd, depicting a world—the ‘end of the world’, in fact—in which nearly everyone behaves badly and there is little to no hope for humanity. As its mountebank prophet Bokonon says of history itself, ‘Read it and weep!’ (168)

“Vonnegut's is not ‘black humor’, but rather something of a ‘comic parable’. Vonnegut instructs the reader through such grim jokes, and the reader knowingly chuckles not because it is funny, and certainly not because of Schadenfreude or in order to make fun of people in unfortunate circumstances, but as a means of making sense of the absurdity and apparent hopelessness confronting us. As Bokonon laments, ‘Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything’ (198). Hence, Vonnegut's sense of humor is also crucial to the novelist's project of making sense of the world. Vonnegut makes sense through humor, which is, in the author's view, as valid a means of mapping this crazy world as any other strategies. And it is often more effective than the strategies made available from those great sense-making systems of science or religion…” https://www.jstor.org/stable/23823826?read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

“Laugh they did, in Auschwitz. In his 1946 memoir about his internment there, Man’s Search for Meaning, the Austrian neurologist Viktor Frankl explored what helped him and others fight for preservation. Humor, he wrote, was one of the ‘soul’s weapons’ to transcend despair. Humor, more than anything else, ‘can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation’.

Antonin Obrdlik determined in his classic sociological work about wartime Czechoslovakia that gallows humor was an ‘index of strength or morale’ on the part of oppressed peoples in precarious or dangerous situations. Ironic jests about gravediggers served as a form of resistance. ‘(Gallows humor’s) decline or disappearance reveals either indifference or a breakdown of the will to resist evil’, he concluded. psychologytoday.com/us/blog/crisis-control/202006/in-praise-gallows-humor

So keep finding the comedy amidst our unfolding tragedy. I watch screwball comedies, old and new, live-action and animated, which helps. Another thing that helps is a spiritual perspective, Hindu-Buddhist-advaita-vedanta, in my case. We’re all just characters in Brahma’s dream, and nirvana is the flip-side of samsara. To quote the Astavakra-gita (18:4), “The universe is but a thought in consciousness. In reality it is nothing. One who sees the true nature of existence and non-existence never ceases to exist.”