A Brief History of Black Comedy

I have a cruel sense of humour, now I’ll leave it at that to avoid one-up-manship; yes, yes your sense of humour is much crueller than mine. But to me the joke

A horse walks into a bar,

The barman says “why the long face”

Has always been missing this addition

The horse answers “I have testicular cancer”

In recent years the internet has exploded with sites filled with shock and black humour. But before we talk about that I want to talk about a serial killer from the 50’s named Ed Gein. Ed was a murderer and grave robber  who did some extremely crazy things most likely due to his strange relationship with his mother, after his mother died he decided to become a woman so he did what any normal person would do; he started making a woman suit out of  genuine woman skin. He would also make and wear masks made out of human faces and when the police finally came to take him away they found a shoe box filled with vaginas. He was so crazy they actually sent him to a mental hospital for the rest of his life; in 1950’s America murderers just got executed, imagine how messed up he had to be for them to not execute him. The sheriff who arrested him died a couple years later due to stress. Which made me wonder hadn’t he ever seen a horror film. The answer of course is not the ones I grew up with as a child seeing as how Buffalo Bill from the Silence of the Lambs, Norman Bates from Psycho and even Leatherface from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre are all based on Gein. Anyways the point is that the public was horrified, but at the same time a wave of comedians began making jokes about it. Psychologist at the time figured that when people can’t quite deal with the reality of a situation they turn to humour as a way to defend themselves.

Which brings me crashing back to the present, there are many things that are horrible with the world and that is why black comedy is alive and booming, anyone who has heard Frankie Boyle speak knows I’m telling the truth.

We are essentially highly evolved monkeys clinging to a rock that is hurtling through space and the rock itself is dying.

Also the addition of the internet to the mix has given people a consequence free place to say things that they wouldn’t normally say and yet places like 4chan are absolutely packed with people laughing at the suffering of others. Anyways what do you think about black comedy? Is it to cruel to be funny or do you laugh so hard your lungs fall out?