Reasons not to Kill Yourself Even Though Life is Meaningless: The Rise of Black Humor

REASONS NOT TO KILL YOURSELF EVEN THOUGH LIFE IS MEANINGLESS: THE RISE OF BLACK HUMOR

Origins

During the 1960s there were plenty of reasons to be depressed: leaders were assassinated, the military was involved in one questionable conflict after another, and French philosophers claimed that life was meaningless. The response of several writers of experimental fiction was to laugh in the face of death and despair, and the reaction was so widespread that it earned a name: black humor.

Comic Antiheroes

Writers of black humor portrayed antiheroes caught up in an absurd world in which traditional values seemed no longer to apply and in which the individual appeared lost in a maze of systems. As bleak as they were, the novels were still funny. Examples include John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961), Thomas Pynchon's V. (1963), John Hawkes's Second Skin (1964), and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Both Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five, for instance, include serious depictions of the horrors and stupidity of war, but both also include comic characters and situations. In Slaughterhouse-Five, the reader follows both Billy Pilgrim's horrific experiences during the war and his abduction by one-eyed aliens shaped like plungers. Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) includes, in addition to its themes of conspiracy and paranoia, a strip-poker game for which the protagonist prepares by putting on every item of clothing in her suitcase and a hilarious description of a grisly Jacobean play.

CATCH-22

If you were among the thousands who played Trivial Pursuit during the 1980s and had said that the phrase catch-22 came before the book of the same title in response to one of the Literature questions, you would have been wrong: the book came first.

Have you ever been in a situation in which you want a job but are told you do not have experience, and you know you cannot get experience unless you get the job? That's catch-22. As Webster's defines it, the term can also refer to anything that is illogical or unreasonable; something that causes the opposite of the desired effect; a case with two alternatives, both bad; or simply as a catch. As used in the source of the phrase, however, catch-22 refers to a no-win problem whose solution is impossible because the situation presents a self-reversing paradox.

In Joseph Heller's 1961 novel Catch-22 there are several examples of what the term means, but the best known involves its protagonist Yossarian, a bombardier in World War II who wants to stop fighting and go home. Only there's a catch—Catch-22, to be precise. A man "would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't, he was sane and had to." Used in the novel as an indictment of illogical bureaucratic policy, catch-22 has since become a commonly used term.

Source:

Stephen W. Potts, "Catch-22": Antiheroic Antinovel (Boston: Twayne, 1989).

Legacy

Certainly black humor existed before the 1960s, but it was at its height during the decade. Nor has it entirely disappeared: black humor has remained a frequent approach in modern fiction in the decades since the 1960s.

Sources:

Bruce Jay Friedman, ed., Black Humor (New York: Bantam, 1965);

Max F. Schulz, Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties: A Pluralistic Definition of Man and His World (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1973).