Genres
Black comedy
A style of comedy that makes light of subject matter generally considered taboo, especially serious or painful topics such as death.
Black comedy, also dark comedy or dark humor, is a style of comedy that makes light of subject matter generally considered taboo, particularly serious or painful topics, aiming to provoke discomfort, reflection and amusement at once. Death is the classic target, and gallows humor is its death-specific branch. André Breton coined "humour noir" in the 1930s and credited Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" as the mode's origin; Evelyn Waugh is called the first sustained black comic novelist, with Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Nathanael West and Vladimir Nabokov on the shelf.
For writers, black comedy is a calibrated tightrope with a long literary pedigree: the joke must stay funny while the subject stays grave, the same double register tragicomedy formalizes and satire aims at a target. When the calibration slips the reader flinches for the wrong reason, so the line between funny and cruel is worth testing on early readers.