Joking Against Humanity? Dark Humor and (De)familiarization

Being based on incongruity and on various kinds of deviation from conventional logic, humor maintains a privileged link with defamiliarization. This is especially the case with dark humor, as the contrast between non-serious and “dark” components often ends up defamiliarizing automatic expectations about the boundaries of humor itself. This chapter proposes a systematic definition of dark humor, establishing a distinction between three basic types (or reception modes) and discussing how each of these types relates to defamiliarization on both a formal and an ideological level. The three types are defined as taboo-breaking (defamiliarizing the discursive habits surrounding a given dark scenario), disparaging (familiarizing negative stereotypes about the victims of the mentioned scenario), and sarcastic (defamiliarizing patterns of thought or behavior that are held morally responsible for the scenario). The key features of each of these categories, as well as the fuzzy boundaries between them, are exemplified through the discussion of a wide range of examples—from Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729) to Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons, COVID-19 memes, and a controversial Holocaust joke by stand-up comedian Jimmy Carr (His Dark Material, 2021).