In a generally thin time for fiction one of the most refreshing recent developments has been a vigorous new growth of satiric talent. It comes from a promising, if often provoking new group of U.S. novelists who were unpublished or all but unnoticed a few years ago These writers demand attention with a maverick, inventive, acidulously adult outlook that delights in salting the sores and needling the niceties of the megaton-megalopolis age. They deserve notice because their brand of comedy is so clearly not the saccharine hilarity packaged by commercial laff merchants not the bad-boy snigger of contemporary bedroom farce. Nor does it necessarily appeal even to sophisticated tastes; it is for those who prefer mountain brooks to mainstreams. But it is strong, dark laughter, echoing—if not equaling—the bitter merriment to which other ages moved Juvenal, Rabelais and Swift.
Black Is the Color. None of these new writers has yet stamped a unique signature on the times. They are rogue talents, unpredictable, disturbing and powerfully individual. Thus they form no cohesive school or even a wave. Nonetheless, critics of late have taken to calling them "black humorists," which is probably as good a tag as any. Among them are such comic writers as Bruce Jay Friedman and Joseph Heller, both of whose first novels were bestsellers. They also include such gifted but less widely read novelists as John Barth and James Purdy; they are perhaps best known for names like Terry Southern, Warren Miller and J. P. Donleavy.
In large measure, they share the same targets. Only bad writers literally hold nothing sacred; the best of the black humorists hold some things too sacred to be bleared with hypocrisy or smeared with prurience. So they mock with a cleansing mirth every emotionally supersudsed subject from sex and death to religion, patriotism, family pieties money, mom, war and the Bomb. They are as well aware as any conventional morahzer that the times are out of joint, but they choose to greet the dislocation with a jeer rather than a jeremiad.
Walk Out in Anger. Their novels reflect an outlook and a mood that today pervade many other areas besides fiction. Dr. Strangelove, treating the hydrogen bomb as a colossal banana peel on which the world slips to annihilation, is a black-humor movie, even though it becomes so incredible that it kills its own joke. Satirical cabaret groups, such as Chicago's Second City or Britain's The Establishment, have offered some of the liveliest black humor, though they can hardly meet Drama Critic Kenneth Tynan's criterion that such satire is successful only if at least a third of the audience stalks out in anger. Dick Gregory of course is the black black humorist. Lenny Bruce, the sick, beat comic who is currently appealing his conviction in New York City for obscene monologues, is still admired by some black humorists as a symbol of "total commitment," though in recent years his commitment to satire has seemed to degenerate into a monotonous self-destructive scatology.