SOURCE: Winston, Mathew. “The Ethics of Contemporary Black Humor.” Colorado Quarterly 24, no. 3 (winter 1976): 275-88.

In the following essay, Winston briefly defines black humor, identifies its major themes and techniques, and addresses charges by literary and cultural critics that works of black humor are “both an image and a cause of decadence and degeneration.”

Philip Roth's novel The Breast features a professor of comparative literature, David Alan Kepesh, who wakes up one morning to find he has mysteriously metamorphosed into a female breast. Trying to find a rational explanation for this mammary phenomenon, he tentatively concludes that he has gone insane and that his transformation is only a madman's delusion. “The books I've been teaching inspired it. They put the idea in my head. I don't mean to sound whimsical, but I'm thinking of my European Literature course. Teaching Gogol and Kafka every year—teaching The Nose and Metamorphosis...