SOURCE: Weisenburger, Steven. “Barth and Black Humor.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 10, no. 2 (summer 1990): 50-5.

In the following essay, Weisenburger provides a history of black humor, comparing it to and differentiating it from conventional satire.

In his 1988 essay “Postmodernism Revisited,” John Barth assents to the critics' identification of his early work—or at least his second novel, The End of the Road—with Black Humor. To Barth, Black Humor was just an early phase of postmodernism as it convulsed aborning. So his real business lies further on, in attempting to define a literary postmodernism that might be more than just an omnium gatherum for contemporary sensibilities. I'd like to back things up, however, and reopen the question of Black Humor by providing a brief historical gloss on Barth's comments, thus to caution against the rather breezy uses of the term in everything from jacket blurbs to recent scholarly monographs...