Show American-style existentialism, and show tragic content in comedy form.

The basic characteristics of black humor are the expression of American existentialism, the tragic content in the form of comedy, the digestion of tradition, and creative artistic experiments such as fable, "anti-hero" and anti-novel.

Black humor, the name of an American literary school in 1960s, is a gloomy, pessimistic and desperate humor. Their representatives are Joseph Herb, Kurt Von Nagert, John Bass, Thomas Pynchon, donald barthelme and so on. The common feature of these people's works is to combine horror and comedy and understand life as a ridiculous and terrible comedy.

1965 Bruce Jay Friedman compiled an anthology, which included some fragments of writers' works and named it "Black Humor". Since then, this trend has become famous in the name of black humor.

Character image

The protagonists of traditional novels generally embody the theme of the novel and keep consistent with the mainstream consciousness of history, which is positive. And this is exactly what black humor deviates from. There is no strict definition of positive and negative characters in black humor works. On the one hand, these characters are absurd and cowardly, trying to evade their responsibilities. On the other hand, they walk on the opposite side of the trend, exposing the absurdity and ugliness of human nature and becoming a different kind of heroic image. These anti-hero images doubt all traditional values and have a sense of loneliness that everyone is drunk and I am alone.