Black Humor:
disturbs because not light-hearted, funny, amusing and laugher-arousing; has little respect for the values and patterns of thought, feeling and behavior; violates sacred and secular (weltlich) taboos without restraint; discovers cause for laughter in what has generally been regarded as too serious for frivolity (death of men, disintegration of social institutions, mental and physical disease, deformity, suffering, anguish, privation, terror); often hostile and sadistic character; in Anglo-American culture often seen as perverse and intolerable; blackness comes from its rejection of morality, its readiness to joke about the horror, violence, injustice and death, its avoidance of sentimentality (by means of emotional coolness) and from its love for surprise and shock; always manifested, exspecially in periods of great stress (war, financial crisis).
