Through black humor : a source and impact study of Kurt Vonnegut's Mother night / by Jeremy Brian Sideris.

Black Humor, a unique literary genre, is a dialectical medium based on the presentation of unabated comic and tragic irony. The basic nature of Black Humor is constant. As a specific genre, Black Humor exists with its own set of definitive rules and traditions. These rules and traditions have not significantly changed from Black Humor's origins as a form of Jewish/German literature known as Galgenhumor ("Gallows Humor") to its ascendency in the cynical pop literature of the 1960s and early 1970s. Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night (1961) has long been considered a seminal example of Black Humor fiction by critics such as Jerome Klinkowitz and Bruce Jay Friedman. Mother Night epitomizes the cynical Black Humor tradition, revealing the genre to be formulaic in its attempts to question morality, the nature of complicity, and the role of satire. This research analyzes Mother Night as an example of Black Humor's basic tenets used to deride the societal norms and mores that lead to human catastrophes such as the Holocaust.