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black humour

   Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Wikipedia, Hutchinson 0.09 sec.

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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Call it black humour, or maybe even fish wisdom, it's an attempt to make the fable less bleak.
Stopkewich dazzled audiences and critics alike with her debut, Kissed, a richly nuanced mix of black humour, morbidity and a uniquely playful portrait of a necrophiliac.
 
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