Anthology of Black Humor. André Breton
enjoy. We are touching upon a burning subject; we are headed straight into a land of fire: the gale winds of passion are alternately with us and against us from the moment we consider lifting the veil from this type of humor, whose manifest products we have nonetheless managed to isolate, with a unique satisfaction, in literature, art, and life. Indeed, we have the sense—if only obscurely—of a hierarchy in which the total possession of humor would assure man the highest rung; but to this very degree, any global definition of humor eludes us, and will probably continue to elude us for some time to come, in virtue of the principle that “man naturally tends to deify what is at the limit of his understanding.” Just as “high initiation (which only a few elite spirits have reached), as the ultimate postulate of High Science, hardly teaches us how to reason with Divinity”* (the High Kabbalah, reduction of High Science to an earthly level, is jealously kept secret by the initiates), there can be no question of explaining humor and making it serve didactic ends. One might just as well try to extract a moral for living from suicide. “There is nothing,” it has been said, “that intelligent humor cannot resolve in gales of laughter, not even the void.… Laughter, as one of humanity’s most sumptuous extravagances, even to the point of debauchery, stands at the lip of the void, offers us the void as a pledge.”† We can imagine the advantage that humor would be liable to take of its very definition, and especially of this definition.
Under these conditions, we shouldn’t wonder that the various surveys on the subject have so far yielded only the most paltry results. For one of them, poorly executed in the November 1921 issue of Aventure, Paul Valéry wrote: “The word humor cannot be translated. If it could, the French would not employ it [in its English form]. But employ it they do, precisely because of the indeterminacy that they read into it, which makes it a very useful word when trying to account for taste. Every statement in which it figures alters its meaning, so that this very meaning is rigorously no more than the statistical totality of all the sentences that contain it, or that eventually will contain it.” In the final analysis, this stance of total reticence is still preferable to the verbosity demonstrated by Mr. Aragon, who in his Treatise on Style seems to have taken it into his head to exhaust the subject (one might say cloud the issue); but humor was not so forgiving, and, subsequently, I can think of no one whom it has abandoned more radically. “You want the rest of humor’s anatomical parts? All right, if you look at that fellow who is raising his hand, Suh? to ask permission to speak, you’ve got the head of hair. The eyes: two holes for mirrors. The ears: shooting lodges. The right hand called symmetry represents the law courts, the left hand is the arm of a one-armed person missing the right.… Humor is what soup, chickens, and symphony orchestras lack. On the other hand, road pavers, elevators, and crush hats have it.… It has been pointed out in kitchen utensils, it has been known to appear in bad taste, and it has its winter quarters in fashion…. Where is it running to? To the optical effect. Its home? The Petit Saint-Thomas. Its favorite writers? A certain Binet-Valmer. Its weakness? The sun like a fried egg in the evening sky. It does not scorn adopting a serious tone. All in all, it bears a strong resemblance to the foresight of a rifle,” etc. A good grade-A senior paper, which takes this theme as it might any other, and which has only an external view of humor. Once again, all this juggling merely begs the question. On the other hand, the subject has been handled with rare precision by Léon Pierre-Quint, who in Le Comte de Lautréamont et Dieu presents humor as a way of affirming, above and beyond “the absolute revolt of adolescence and the internal revolt of adulthood,” a superior revolt of the mind.
For there to be humor.… The problem remains posed. Still, we can credit Hegel with having made humor take a giant step forward into the domain of knowledge when he raised it to the concept of objective humor. “The fundamental principle of Romantic art,” he said, “is the concentration of the soul upon itself. On finding that the external world does not perfectly respond to its innermost nature, the soul turns away from it. This opposition was developed in the period of Romantic art, to the point where we have seen interest be paid sometimes to the accidents of the external world, sometimes to the whims of personality. But, now, if that interest goes so far as to absorb the mind in external contemplation, and if at the same time humor, while maintaining its subjective and reflective character, lets itself be captivated by the object and its real form, we obtain in this penetration a humor that is in a certain sense objective.” Elsewhere,* I stated that the black sphinx of objective humor could not avoid meeting, on the dust-clouded road of the future, the white sphinx of objective chance, and that all subsequent human creation would be the fruit of their embrace.
Let us note in passing that the position Hegel assigns the various arts (poetry leads them all as the only universal art; it patterns their behavior on its own, insofar as it is the only art that can represent the successive situations of life) suffices to explain why the kind of humor at issue here began appearing in poetry much earlier than it did in painting, for example. Satiric and moralizing intentions exert a degrading influence on almost every work of the past that, in some way, has been inspired by that kind of humor, threatening to push these works into caricature. At most, we would be tempted to make an occasional exception for Hogarth or Goya, and to reserve judgment about others in whose work humor can be sensed but at best remains hypothetical—such as in the quasi-totality of Seurat’s painted opus. It would seem that, in visual art, we must consider the triumph of humor in its pure and manifest state a much more recent phenomenon, and recognize as its first practitioner of genius the Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada. In his admirable “popular” style woodcuts, Posada brought to life all the upheavals of the 1910 revolution (the ghosts of Villa and Fierro should be studied alongside these images, for a possible passage from speculative humor to action—Mexico, moreover, with its splendid funeral toys, stands as the chosen land of black humor). Since then, this kind of humor has acted in painting as if it were on conquered territory. Its black grass ceaselessly ripples wherever the horse of Max Ernst, “the Bride of the Wind,” has passed. If we limit ourselves to books, there is in this regard nothing more accomplished, more exemplary than his three “collage” novels: The Hundred Headless Woman, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, and Une Semaine de bonté ou les Sept Eléments capitaux [A Week of Goodness, or the Seven Deadly Elements].
Cinema, insofar as it not only, like poetry, represents the successive stages of life, but also claims to show the passage from one stage to the next, and insofar as it is forced to present extreme situations to move us, had to encounter humor almost from the start. The early comedies of Mack Sennett, certain films of Chaplin’s (The Adventurer, The Pilgrim), and the unforgettable “Fatty” Arbuckle and “Fuzzy” (Al St. John) command the line that should by rights lead to the midnight sunbursts that are Million Dollar Legs and Animal Crackers, and to those excursions to the bottom of the mental grotto—Fingal’s Cave as much as Pozzuoli’s crater—that are Buñuel and Dalí’s Un Chien andalou and L’Age d’or, by way of Picabia’s Entr’acte.
“It is now time,” says Freud, “to acquaint ourselves with some of the characteristics of humor. Like wit and the comic, humor has in it a liberating element. But it has also something fine and elevating, which is lacking in the other two ways of deriving pleasure from intellectual activity. Obviously, what is fine about it is the triumph of narcissism, the ego’s victorious assertion of its own invulnerability. It refuses to be hurt by the arrows of reality or to be compelled to suffer. It insists that it is impervious to wounds dealt by the outside world, in fact, that these are merely occasions for affording it pleasure.” Freud gives this common, but adequate, example: the condemned man being led to the gallows on a Monday who observes, “What a way to start the week!” We know that at the end of his analysis of humor, he sees it as a mode of thought that aims at saving itself the expenditure of feeling required by pain. “Without quite knowing why, we attribute to this less intensive pleasure a high value: we feel it to have a peculiarly liberating and elevating effect.” According to him, the secret of the humorous attitude would rest on the ability that certain individuals have, in cases of serious alarm, to displace the psychic accent away from the ego and onto the superego, the latter being genetically conceived as heir to the parental function (“it often holds the ego in strict subordination,