Yes, a clueless little girl playing with her kitty. I see the premise. Why, instead of making me chuckle or even go “yeah, yeah, I heard it years ago,” does it leave me cold with dread and despair?
All I can think of is the horrible realization that is going to dawn on the clumsy little innocent that she has bashed in her beloved cat’s noggin and killed it – perhaps accompanied by a hysterical shrieking fit of rage and/or corporal abuse from mother. Then nightmares, bed wetting, further abuse, foster care…are you in stitches yet?
Mr. Mike on SNL and a lot of the old National Lampoon stuff used to leave me with this same feeling of haunted misery. Where, exactly, were they coming from, and where where they trying to get to?
Call me unsophisticated, unevolved, square, but I always thought of black humor as, you know, humor. A wink and a smile. Arsenic and Old Lace. Tom Lehrer poisoning pigeons in the park, tra-la-la. Monty Python’s Black Knight – “All right, we’ll call it a draw!”
This pseudo-realist stuff is like holding a gun to my head and saying, “Laugh, bitch.” Is that the point?
I’m not a hypersensitive person, and not very easily offended… I just read the Onion piece you linked to, and it didn’t offend me, hurt me, gross me out… or laugh.
It made me feel a weird cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. I don’t know what exactly that is, but it isn’t funny. Funny feels nicer than that.
I saw a cartoon strip series years ago in the city paper on how to draw a cartoon strip.The episode I read was on knowing when to stop the episode.The first panel was the inebriated husband getting conked with the rolling pin by the wife as he came in the door=funny.The next panel was the husband on a stretcher,sheet over his face and the wife being led away in handcuffs=not funny.I guess humor is knowing when to quit.
Humor tends to come from unexpected juxtaposition, and in this case it’s the fact that this poor girl’s ramblings are formatted as a newspaper column. Take it out of that context, and it loses any semblance of irony or humor. It’s just sad.
I rarely find black humor amusing. That article certainly had nothing funny in it. Occasionally black humor will sneak up and surprise me and make me laugh, but it is rare enough that I don’t remember the last time that happened.
Count me in as another who doesn’t usually laugh at black humor. Dead baby jokes are classic black humor, and I’ve never really found them amusing. I get that the humor draws from the situations being disgustingly over-the-top and ridiculous, but that just doesn’t appeal to me. I’ll laugh at black humor if it’s actually clever and funny, but shock value for the sake of shock value usually isn’t.
Kitty! fails for me not because of the subject matter or what happens after the story ends, but rather because it goes on too long without any real wit. Boiled down to just one paragraph it could be really, darkly funny. Moving the viewpoint to an outside observer could also work, like a more gruesome version of the “hamster in the remote-control truck” article.
It’s the cold feeling of dread and despair that makes it funny! Well, not exactly, but black humor is a way of excising those feelings. If you can laugh at something, then in a way you’ve made it smaller than yourself: containable, managable, something you can live through, or at least with. Black humor is a way of coping with the unbearable. If the situation doesn’t make you feel incredibly uncomfortable even while you’re laughing, it’s not really black humor. Your example of the Black Knight from Monty Python isn’t remotely “black,” because the character is so unconcerned by his multiple amputations. It should be horrible, but he just doesn’t care. There’s no sense of horror or shock, it’s just goofy. For whatever reason, for this character in this universe, losing all your limbs simply isn’t a bad thing. Arthurian myths had a few characters who were simply unaffected by being dismembered, and the scene is a satire of that.
So, yeah, the Onion article works as black humor for me. I’m not easily affected by stories about animals or children, and I still felt queasy reading this one. I could just sit there and feel queasy, or I can laugh. And laughing is just more fun. Of course, I could just try not to read that stuff at all, but there’s a sort of fascination in poking at a sore spot, you know? Besides, you don’t always have the option of turning away from horribly situations, so it doesn’t hurt to practice it a bit with fiction before you have to deal with tragedy in the real world.
Of course, I also get to feel smug because I’m more “with it” than the nine squares in this thread who don’t like/get black humor. To be entirely honest, that’s also a huge part of the appeal. Getting a joke is an easy way to become part of the “in-group,” and black humor is a way of getting to be part of the in group that doesn’t really require that you be witty, or sophisticated, just tougher in a rather indefinable (and, yes, largely meaningless) way.
You’re certainly not going to laugh if you look at everything that way. Most humor is based on things that are unpleasant for someone else. Not that I found the article even close to funny.
I always thought dead baby jokes were funny because they’re not clever and so gleefully tasteless. That’s not the same as what makes black humor work.
This is exactly right. It’s a one liner. But rather than TELL the one liner, the Onion is illustrating it. Rather than going, “Wouldn’t it be funny if there was a newspaper column that consisted on nothing more than [insert surrealism of choice here]?”–they simply present the subject of said one liner–the surreal column itself. But because it IS a “column,” it can’t consist of just one paragraph or two. It has to be a whole column. So what you have is a one liner with way more text to it than just one line. (This is of course another surreal juxtaposition.) But for the purposes of the “joke,” the text might as well be greeked. The only reason to read the whole thing is to see just how far the Onion is willing to stretch the joke, or to see if SURELY there is something conventionally FUNNY buried SOMEWHERE in the column. When you get to the end and there are no real “funnies” to be found, and you discover that they’re willing to take the joke all the way, without every “breaking character,” that’s the Andy Kaufman moment; the third surrealism
And of course, there’s no better way to strip a joke of all its humor than to try to explain it. So if you don’t find it funny, my analysis will not change that. I’m just trying to explain why I found it funny.
And of course there’s the added humor that you just KNOW that some people are gonna be horrified by this; are gonna react as if you’re writing about a REAL kid and and REAL kitten. My favorite surreal joke of all, Ceci n’est pas une pipe.
I’m another with the OP. The article linked isn’t really what I’d call humor. Just sad. And as another poster said - if it had been a single, short, witty paragraph I could see it being hilarious.
I love black humor, but there has to be some kind of sly wink, or absolute defiance of the Grim Reaper, for me to really like it.
Dark humor is funny because it allows people to laugh at the plight of others.
That sounds mean, but it’s the truth. Who hasn’t laughed at some guy tripping on the sidewalk? Or at any of the 300 nutshots America’s Funniest Home Videos shows during a typical episode?
It’s one of the core concepts of comedy that someone else’s misfortune is funny because it’s identifiable, it grants a feeling of superiority, and it isn’t you. Every blonde joke subscribes to it (She’s stupid. I’m not because I get it. I am superior to her and so I can laugh).
However, I think there is a difference between dark humor and morbid humor. That Onion article is an example of morbid humor (if it could be called humor at all), and appeals in a different way. Whereas dark humor gives a person a chuckle because they chuckler is almost embarrassed for the “victim” (laughter is usually the first response to embarrassment), morbid humor plays on a more sadistic side of human nature, which not everyone “embraces”.
I love black humor and I didn’t find this all that funny. I almost chuckled at the “don’t get your lipstick on me, messy kitty!” line but that’s it. I think that if the situation would have been even more horrific (say, a little girl playing plastic-bag astronaut with her sleeping daddy) it would have been funny, but I don’t know why that is. Like lissener said, if you have to explain it then that takes all the magic away. The Onion’s had better black humor pieces than this, though.
