Only black humor

Modern American literary genre. Mainly popular in the mid-to-late 1960s, representative writers include Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnig, John Bass, Thomas Pynchon, James Purdy, Donald Bartomey and others. In 1965, B.J. Friedman compiled the works of 12 of the writers into a collection of short stories titled "Black Humor", and the name of the genre came from this. The characteristics of black humor novels are that they highlight the absurdity and cruelty of the living environment, use helpless ridicule and attack traditional values ??and aesthetic concepts, and express the alienation of the world, the degradation of human nature and the fragmentation of emotions. Through exaggeration and splicing, the conflicts and contradictions are dramatized, making readers feel deeply absurd and funny, but also depressed and heavy, and the future is uncertain. Critics therefore call it "gallows humor" or "jokes in times of disaster." Black humor is an anti-rational and anti-idealistic literary experimental work in a specific environment. It has certain critical significance and sensational effect. It also contains pessimistic nihilism and excessive destruction of literary norms.