A black comedy, or dark comedy, is a comic work that employs black humor, which, in its most basic definition, is humor that makes light of otherwise solemn subject matter, or gallows humor. The definition of black humor is problematic; it has been argued that it corresponds to the earlier concept of gallows humor.
Famous quotes containing the words black and/or comedy:
“We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other—male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“Unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)