SOURCE: Green, Daniel. “A World Worth Laughing At: Catch-22 and the Humor of Black Humor.” Studies in the Novel 27, no. 2 (summer 1995): 186-95.

In the following essay, Green examines the lighter aspects of Heller's Catch-22, contending that because critics frequently focus on darker themes in black humor fiction, the comic aspects of these works are often neglected.

One can't help but note that in the commentary about the fiction conventionally identified with the mode of “black humor” there is much discussion of what makes such fiction black, but little of its humor. The most famous expression of this tendency occurs in probably the most frequently cited book on black humor, Max Schulz's Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties. “I have shied away from the humor in Black Humor,” writes Schulz. Choosing instead to focus on what he calls the “cosmic labyrinth,” Schulz claims that “to give equal value to...