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...