SOURCE: Winston, Mathew. “Black Humor: To Weep with Laughing.” Comedy: New Perspectives 1 (spring 1978): 31-43.

In the following essay, Winston offers an account of the development of black humor, from the first use of the phrase by André Breton to its definition in modern American literature. Winston examines historical approaches and the use of satire in literature as well as its relevance in modern writing.

“Strange times, that weep with laughing, not with weeping.” We might well appropriate this observation by Shakespeare's Timon of Athens exclusively to our time, did its context not remind us that Jacobean England and Periclean Athens were also strange in their own ways. But Timon's remark is an apt commentary on the literature of our day, when the forms that elicit tears and laughter—tragedy and melodrama, comedy and farce—have lost their distinctness and assurance. What has combined and replaced them is a...