Black comedy

Bits and pieces for educational purposes

Collected by the project team in 2021

Erasmus+ school project “May ICT be with you”

CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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A style of comedy

• morbid or ghastly elements contrasted with comical ones
• farce combined with low comedy

Famous authors:

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• André Breton (coined the term in 1935)
• Joseph Heller
• Eugène Ionesco

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Popular themes

• Death
• Violence
• Slavery
• Genocide
• Discrimination
• Disease
• Human sexuality

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Well-known black comedy books

• Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut Jr.)
• Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
• Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk)
• American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis)
• The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov)
• Animal Farm (George Orwell)
• The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (Jonas Jonasson)

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Well-known black comedy films

• Parasite
• Deadpool
• Dr. Strangelove
• Fargo
• American Psycho
• Fight Club
• Pulp Fiction

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• Burn after reading
• In Bruges
• Birdman
• The Grand Budapest Hotel
• Borat

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“Life is a tragedy when seen in a close-up, but a comedy in a long-shot.”

―Charlie Chaplin

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