"To move wild laughter in the throat of death" : an anatomy of Black Humor
Authors:   , Freisinger Randall R. 
Published: June 2024

This dissertation presents an extended definition of a literary genre that has been labelled "Black Humor" by many contemporary critics. Though the phrase has been used with increasing frequency in the last ten years, it has not yet been satisfactorily defined. This study examines thoroughly the identity of the Black Humorist and the chemistry of his art in order to provide the satisfactory definition which is at present so badly needed. Although the dissertation does not consider every novelist who has been called a Black Humorist, it does draw from the work of approximately fourteen novelists, including John Barth, Stanley Elkin, Bruce Jay Friedman, Joseph Heller, Ken Kesey, Walker Percy, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut. The informing structure for the study is Kenneth Burke's pentad of key terms. In A Grammar of Motives Burke develops his pentad as the generating principle for his investigation of human motives. The five terms of the pentad are Act (what took place), Agent (who performed the Act), Scene (the situation in which the Act occurred), Agency (the means used), and Purpose (the reasons for which the Act was performed). The dissertation focuses on who the Black Humorist is, when he writes, what world view dominates the scene of his fiction, what literary modes he employs, and what goals he seeks to accomplish. Chapter One provides an overview of the literary history of the label, with special attention to the controversy which the term has stimulated and to the inadequacies of the major attempts at defining it. Chapter Two examines Act/Agent and Scene. Act here refers to Black Humor itself, the act of writing in that particular mode. Agent refers to the Black Humorist. The first two components of the pentad are treated together in order to advance the viewpoint that Black Humor has appeared in literary periods other than the twentieth century. The section on Scene discusses these six assumptions which constitute the Black Humorist's world view: (1) That the world is absurd; (2) That man is the victim of some vague, sinister conspiracy; (3) That the Self has been lost or heavily masked; (4) That "society is sterile, reductive, and confining, a conviction projected repeatedly through controlling metaphors of the waste land, the asylum, and the prison; (5) That man is threatened by technology; and (6) That the world may be at, or near, the Apocalypse. The apocalyptic vision of the Black Humorist ranges from Nathanael West's and Vonnegut's traditional images of fire, war, plague, and riots to the entropy-induced Apocalypse of Pynchon. Chapter Three examines Agency in Black Humor. After an initial consideration of the relationship between traditional comic theory and Black Humor, the chapter asserts that the three major agencies of the Black Humorist are satire, gallows humor, and the grotesque. Most critics who have attempted to define Black Humor either deny the relevance of satire and the grotesque or they assume the relevance without specifically anatomizing the relationship. This chapter rejects both of these approaches by studying the three agencies separately and then establishing the connection between each of these genres and Black Humor. Chapter Four investigates the Purpose of Black Humor, concluding that the aim if two-fold: to promote laughter and to instill a qualified hope that humanity can at least cope with the world's absurdity and thereby survive. The chapter stresses the therapeutic value of laughter and the presence in all Black Humor of some degree of hope, ranging from the life-affirming symbolic gestures of Heller and Kesey to the extremely muted hope of Barth and Pynchon.