Dark humor
In this season of family reunions and holiday sentiments, there are times when you need a dose of dark humor.
My brother Keith recently asked for recommendations of literature that is dark and funny. I came up with the list below, roughly arranged from funnier to darker. (The ratio of darkness to humor in some works, like Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, is so high that I find them hard to enjoy.)
Funnier
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young
Hokum, edited by Paul Beatty
The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (and lots of other Vonnegut)
The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Darker
More suggestions are welcome!
Most of Charles Willeford’s work would qualify, especially his Hoke Moseley novels. My favorite quote concerning the subject is attributed to him: “Just tell the truth and they’ll accuse you of writing black humor.”