The Play Of Black Humor: A Postmodern Study Of Cross Genre Texts

Abstract

This study utilizes "black humor," a modernist literary genre, as a tool for the postmodern cross-genre reading. The primary objective is to investigate how serious subjects such as death, world wars, sex, science, and religion are treated in a non-serious manner through the mask of black humor. The research examines how humor is used as a coping mechanism to deal with difficult issues and to allow individuals to exist in an absurd world. According to the Black Humor ideology, life after the World Wars is inevitably depressing, leading followers to perceive concepts like religion, power, violence, and death as meaningless. By laughing at the absurdity of the world, the individual can accept life's circumstances as useless, hopeless, and worthless, but also as trivial. This is supported by Sigmund Freud’s theory that Black Comedy occurs when "the ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality". Furthermore, black humor, alongside irony and the concept of "play," is considered one of the most recognizable aspects of postmodernism. For this investigation, the researcher selected works from a variety of genres by postmodern authors, including Donald Barthelme, Angela Carter, Country Joe McDonald, and Kurt Vonnegut. The analysis is framed by demonstrating how writers attempted to subsume the atrocities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in black humor by fusing moral thoughts with slapstick comedy. The study concludes that black humor dissolves the funny features of traditional humor through absurd expression, generating new literature that is distinct from traditional tragedy and drama by employing laughter to express tragedy and absurdly describe the tragic plot.