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black humour

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black humour

Humour marked by the use of morbid, ironic, or grotesquely comic episodes that ridicule human folly. The term came into common use in the 1960s to describe the work of novelists such as Joseph Heller, whose Catch-22 (1961) is an outstanding example; Kurt Vonnegut, particularly in Slaughterhouse Five (1969); and Thomas Pynchon, in V (1963) and Gravity's Rainbow (1973). A film exemplar is Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1963). The term black comedy has been applied to some playwrights in the Theatre of the Absurd, especially Eugène Ionesco.



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Byline: OLIVER HOLT PAUL HART does a nice line in black humour.
President Sarkozy's remark "Laissez-faire, c'est fini", ranks as black humour in its implication that the EU with its thousands of pages of regulations and laws, contained in the Acquis Communautaire, could be equated with laissez-faire.
The main course saw the black humour stepped up when the macabre but comic witch, played with zest by Graham Clark hidden inside a fat suit, stole the show, leaving puppets and moving trees from the first acts in the shade.
 
 
 
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