Anthology of Black Humor
edited by Andre Breton
Surrealism was an art movement founded between the two world wars by its figurehead Andre Breton. The theory behind it was that Western rationality had built up modern society by suppressing humanity’s emotions, dreams, passions, and desires. In Freudian terms, this meant the id was imprisoned in the unconscious by the superego, or the collective society, that demanded obedience from the individual’s ego. The result was not only the misery of industrialization with its ugly factories and pollution, the repression of individual happiness, and a disconnection from nature, but also the insanity of two world wars. Hyper-rationality was killing the human spirit. So the Surrealists set out to set the unconscious free from its prison by embracing irrationality. Their art utilized intuition and chance to explore dream imagery, altered stated of consciousness, occult practice like automatic writing and fortune telling, and so-called primitive art from Africa, the Americas, and the South Pacific. In the end, they became one of the most ambitious, intriguing, and influential of the 20th century’s avant-garde art movements.
However, Andre Breton himself turned out to be a bit of a tyrant. Sooner or later, ever member of the Surrealist group got shown the exit by Breton for not being sufficiently Surrealist in the ways he wanted them to be. For a guy who claimed to embrace the intuitive and the irrational, you can’t say this was out of character. But another side of his bellicosity may have been the result of some of the other Surrealists finding more fame and commercial success than Breton. Ultimately, the Surrealists did make some incredible art, at least when taking the visual arts and film into account. Surrealist literature never reached the heights that other Surrealist mediums did. In any case, Breton put together his Anthology of Black Humor to showcase literary passages that capture and exemplify the spirit of Surrealism. As you may predict, it isn’t as engaging as the rest of the Surrealist project.
The book starts off with a good explanatory essay by Andre Breton. The purpose of black humor, in the sense of Surrealism, is to revolt against the repressive nature of society. He writes about humor that is cruel, violent, subversive, and allowed to run free with laughter being an outpouring of emotion that strikes a blow against the crushing weight of society’s superego. It is a volcanic outburst that liberates the individual from restraint, allowing an eruption of psychic energy and vitality that liberates each person so that their desires and creativity can flow freely. This humor has to be violent because its purpose is to break down all resistance to human freedom. One of Breton’s famous quotes is “beauty will be convulsive or it will be nothing at all.” What could be more convulsive than a burst of laughter at a sick and offensive joke, an explosive laughter so titanic in strength that it causes a disruption in the dreary orderliness of society? Humor has to be cruel and dark enough to be so disruptive. That is a tall demand to live up to.
Alas, most of the passages in this book do not reach those heights. At its best, this collection has some familiar names that go far in reaching the intention. It contains excerpts from Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”, Sade’s Juliette, and Lewis Carroll’s “The Lobster Quadrille.” There are a few other lesser known works by famous authors like Charles Baudelaire’s story about deliberately ruining the day of a street vendor selling glassware, the drunken Edgar Allan Poe having a conversation with a hallucinated man made out of wine bottles, J.K. Huysmans explains the need to harvest ptomaine from corpses to be used for perfume bases and flavorings for food to be eaten by the deceased’s family, and finally Leonora Carrington convinces a hyena at the zoo to attend a ball disguised as her and eat all the food because she prefers to stay home. These morbid passages are the funniest, the most disturbing, and the most most memorable ones in the anthology.
There are other recognizable names included like Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Salvador Dali, Arthur Rimbaud, and Comte de Lautreamont. Aside from the name recognition, these chapters don’t do much to keep the book interesting. Breton has a funny way of selecting some obscure writings by these authors that don’t come across as hilarious or even lend much to the book overall. There is also some poetry and a few passages by unrecognizable authors as well. It’s probable that the French sense of humor does not translate well into English and Surrealist humor, which is intended to be irrational, makes it all that much more opaque and incomprehensible.
Anthology of Black Humor is, overall, an underwhelming collection of writing. There are very few laugh-out-loud moments and even the funniest parts aren’t the kind of humor that will make you laugh until you break out in tears. Also, too many of the chapters are simply beyond comprehension; a lot of them read like smug inside jokes that most of us will never be privileged enough to understand. This collection fails to reach the earth shattering intentions that Andre Breton lays out in the introduction. Yet again, this is one of those books that I love the idea of, but don’t feel satisfied with its realization. And if you really are still wondering what black humor is all about, just remember the cannibal who bit into the arm of a clown. With a look of disgust on his face, the cannibal said, “This tastes funny” and spit the clown meat out.
However, Andre Breton himself turned out to be a bit of a tyrant. Sooner or later, ever member of the Surrealist group got shown the exit by Breton for not being sufficiently Surrealist in the ways he wanted them to be. For a guy who claimed to embrace the intuitive and the irrational, you can’t say this was out of character. But another side of his bellicosity may have been the result of some of the other Surrealists finding more fame and commercial success than Breton. Ultimately, the Surrealists did make some incredible art, at least when taking the visual arts and film into account. Surrealist literature never reached the heights that other Surrealist mediums did. In any case, Breton put together his Anthology of Black Humor to showcase literary passages that capture and exemplify the spirit of Surrealism. As you may predict, it isn’t as engaging as the rest of the Surrealist project.
The book starts off with a good explanatory essay by Andre Breton. The purpose of black humor, in the sense of Surrealism, is to revolt against the repressive nature of society. He writes about humor that is cruel, violent, subversive, and allowed to run free with laughter being an outpouring of emotion that strikes a blow against the crushing weight of society’s superego. It is a volcanic outburst that liberates the individual from restraint, allowing an eruption of psychic energy and vitality that liberates each person so that their desires and creativity can flow freely. This humor has to be violent because its purpose is to break down all resistance to human freedom. One of Breton’s famous quotes is “beauty will be convulsive or it will be nothing at all.” What could be more convulsive than a burst of laughter at a sick and offensive joke, an explosive laughter so titanic in strength that it causes a disruption in the dreary orderliness of society? Humor has to be cruel and dark enough to be so disruptive. That is a tall demand to live up to.
Alas, most of the passages in this book do not reach those heights. At its best, this collection has some familiar names that go far in reaching the intention. It contains excerpts from Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”, Sade’s Juliette, and Lewis Carroll’s “The Lobster Quadrille.” There are a few other lesser known works by famous authors like Charles Baudelaire’s story about deliberately ruining the day of a street vendor selling glassware, the drunken Edgar Allan Poe having a conversation with a hallucinated man made out of wine bottles, J.K. Huysmans explains the need to harvest ptomaine from corpses to be used for perfume bases and flavorings for food to be eaten by the deceased’s family, and finally Leonora Carrington convinces a hyena at the zoo to attend a ball disguised as her and eat all the food because she prefers to stay home. These morbid passages are the funniest, the most disturbing, and the most most memorable ones in the anthology.
There are other recognizable names included like Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Salvador Dali, Arthur Rimbaud, and Comte de Lautreamont. Aside from the name recognition, these chapters don’t do much to keep the book interesting. Breton has a funny way of selecting some obscure writings by these authors that don’t come across as hilarious or even lend much to the book overall. There is also some poetry and a few passages by unrecognizable authors as well. It’s probable that the French sense of humor does not translate well into English and Surrealist humor, which is intended to be irrational, makes it all that much more opaque and incomprehensible.
Anthology of Black Humor is, overall, an underwhelming collection of writing. There are very few laugh-out-loud moments and even the funniest parts aren’t the kind of humor that will make you laugh until you break out in tears. Also, too many of the chapters are simply beyond comprehension; a lot of them read like smug inside jokes that most of us will never be privileged enough to understand. This collection fails to reach the earth shattering intentions that Andre Breton lays out in the introduction. Yet again, this is one of those books that I love the idea of, but don’t feel satisfied with its realization. And if you really are still wondering what black humor is all about, just remember the cannibal who bit into the arm of a clown. With a look of disgust on his face, the cannibal said, “This tastes funny” and spit the clown meat out.
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