Customer Reviews

Anthology of Black Humor

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breton's eulogy of surrealist revolt is basically incarnated in this book, which is a collection of insane and eccentric (particularly lacenaire, murderer and poet) figures who, through absurd humor and surrealistic flights of the fantastic, cast serious (sometimes dangerous) doubts on the validity of the Reality Principle. The best in this collection is perhaps Benjamin Peret, the most uncompromising surrealist of them all. His work is completely recalcitrant to mundane reality, forcing it to become magical and, of course, surreal. Admittedly, some of these writers are difficult to penetrate, but the effort is certainly worth it. Jarry especially.

I am writing in response to the person who said that the selections in here are childish. Do you even understand black humour, dadaism, or surealism? Since when is being childish a bad thing?

I want to vomit right now. Good.

Though this edition is revised, a newer collection would be more practical since the advent of post-modern thinking with the likes of Pynchon, Barth, Barthelme, Gaddis, Hawkes, and Heller heading the movement.

This collection is bogged down by Breton's psychoanalytic readings in the author introductions and his grasping for authors and passages to lengthen the page count in order to have a sizable book.

Yet there are names which have long since been forgotten which, due to this collection, are sustained and might later be an aide in their reevaluation.

Highlights include: Grabbe, Allais, Baudelaire, L'Isle-Adam, Cros, Huysmans, Jarry, Rigaut.

This book is only for those who are studying the field and will be a bitter disappointment for anyone else, esp. people looking for a humor collection per se.

This book was good because it contained lots of sarcastic, twisted ideas which arose mainly in the nineteenth century. don't read it for fun, read it because you have absolutely nothing better to do. Ta-ta!

Andre Breton had selected the forty core texts for this anthology by 1936, but its publication was delayed by World War II until 1945.

Virtually all of the authors were unfamiliar to me, and some are excruciatingly funny, but most are surrealists bogged down in Freudian concepts of the id, ego and superego.

Neither Breton nor the translator, Mark Polizzotti, ever bothers to define Black Humor, but if they did, their definition would be Freudian and out-of-line with more modern views. Most of the pieces selected are, unfortunately, childish, unintelligible and boring.

Life's short and there are a lot of great books to read. This is not one of them