The trouble with the Black Humorists is that they are not, as a rule, very humorous. They are, in fact, generally very depressing…. It is not necessarily the genre that is at fault but the execution. We have our classics of Black Humor which are very funny indeed. And if the young are said to admire them more than their elders it is because, as always, much of the cynicism goes over their pretty little heads. And even that is assuming—contrary to my observation—that the young read anything at all.

Kurt Vonnegut has risen, if that is the word, to Black Humor from an even more dubious genre, humorous science fiction, having put out a couple of volumes of it before he eased over into the main stream with his first "serious" novel, Cat's Cradle. This is a tale of the end of the world as brought about through human stupidity, a theme always good for a few chuckles in terms of Black Humor. This novel, as his subsequent ones, carries some of the stigmata of Mr. Vonnegut's pulp fiction origins—the one-line paragraph, and the feeling that, at three cents a word, no word ever got x-ed out and no joke was ever deemed too feeble or tasteless for inclusion.

Nevertheless Mr. Vonnegut came through with real promise on his second serious novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater…. [The] book is good because Mr. Vonnegut occasionally forgets about being Black and concentrates on being Humorous to real effect. These passages are oddly tangential, even irrelevant, to the main story line. They deal with the denizens of a New England fishing village and it is not difficult to say why these bizarre folk are funny in their madness while Mr. Vonnegut's Mad Millionaire is not. It is simply that they are believable. Even Pisquontuit's thirteen-year-old Lila Buntline, the town's leading dealer in smut, is real compared to the ingenious but heavy tendentiousness of Mr. Rosewater.

It all goes back to one of the eternal verities of fiction—create believable characters and you don't have to do a single blessed other thing right. The characters don't have to be literal—they can be just as grotesque as Mr. Vonnegut's wonderful minor characters, and just as Black in their Humors. It all comes down to the fact that there is good Black Humor and bad Black Humor—a critical perception slow to make headway.

In [Mother Night] Mr. Vonnegut tackles what should be a dilly for a Black Humorist—an American Counter-Intelligence agent who worked for the Nazis during World War II as an anti-Semitic propagandist…. There ought to be lots of good belly-laughs in this one, of course, but somehow they don't emerge.

But if there is anything that the Black Humorists have taught us it is that the venture was not necessarily foredoomed by its implausibility. We can thank them for showing us once again (it has happened often before in literary history without the tag of Black Humor) that no material is ultimately resistant to the alchemy of humor…. Mr. Vonnegut's attempts … to make us laugh, however bitterly, in areas presumed intractable to laughter may do something toward opening those areas out to a renewed consideration—a sort of shaking up in the kaleidoscope of laughter that enables us to see things in a new pattern.

Unfortunately, Mother Night does not completely succeed in its permutating bath of laughter. Only a few years ago we would have said that this was because his subject matter was unsuitable. Too many marvelous satiric feats, however, have been performed in recent years (not least by Mr. Vonnegut) for us to doubt that the trick can be done. It is the unsettling but healthy lesson the Black Humorists have taught us—that no disease is immune to laughter. And if the laughter frightens or angers us it only means that we must look once more at ourselves to see what is truly serious within us, and what is the mere facade of conviction without reason and without true belief. Perhaps this is another way of stating what Mr. Vonnegut says is the moral of his novel: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. (pp. 592-94)