The Symbolism Of Black Humor In Cat's Crad

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Black Humor in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle

The phrase Black Humor has the broad meaning of poking "fun at subjects considered deadly serious or even taboo by some"2. This definition is simple, and yet embodies an important idea that is often lost in more complex definitions: the idea that Black Humor can actually be "fun", and provoke laughter. This is not, of course, the only important aspect of the term, and I shall explore some of the other important defining features of Black Humor before moving on to discuss its use in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle3.

Many critics have attempted definitions of Black Humor, none of them entirely successfully. The most significant recurring features of these definitions are that Black Humor works with: absurdity, ironic detachment4; opposing moral views held in equipoise, humanity's lack of a sense of purpose in the unpredictable nuclear age, the realization of the complexity of moral and aesthetic experience which affects the individual's ability to choose a course of action5; and a playing with the reader's ideas of reality6.

On their own these elements don't make up what we understand as Black Humor. Combine all of these ideas with the generation of humor, particularly through incongruity, and …show more content…

But by the end of the novel, the reader has no firm idea about whether 'right meanings' are possible. This is summarized by John's discovery of the Bokononist paradox, "the heartbreaking necessity to lie about reality, and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it"28; that there is no 'true' or 'right' answer to humanity's lack of a sense of purpose in the unpredictable nuclear age. Except perhaps as Voltaire and Kant have suggested in hope, sleep and

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