Page 235 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

History of English Literature

Notes issues, thus provoking discomfort and serious thought as well as amusement in their audience.
Popular themes of the genre include murder, suicide, depression, abuse, mutilation, war, barbarism,
drug abuse, terminal illness, domestic violence, sexual violence, paedophilia, insanity, nightmare,
disease, racism, disability (both physical and mental), chauvinism, corruption, and crime. A related
theme is frustrated suicide.
By contrast, blue comedy focuses more on crude topics, such as nudity, sex and bodily fluids.
Although the two are interrelated, black comedy is different from straightforward obscenity in
that it is more subtle and does not necessarily have the explicit intention of offending people. In
obscene humor, much of the humorous element comes from shock and revulsion, while black
comedy might include an element of irony, or even fatalism. For example, the archetypal black-
comedy self-mutilation in English appears in the novel Tristram Shandy. Tristram, five years old
at the time, starts to urinate out of an open window for lack of a chamber pot. The sash falls and
circumcises him; his family reacts with both chaotic action and philosophic digression.
Comedians, like Lenny Bruce, that since the late 1950s have been labeled "sick comedy" by
mainstream journalists, have also been labeled with "black comedy." After Lenny Bruce, others
have been Sam Kinison, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Bill Hicks, Jimmy Carr, Chris Morris and
the Monty Python team, and more recently Bo Burnham, Tim Minchin, Louis C.K., and The Whitest
Kids U' Know. Popular cartoon shows such as South Park, The Simpsons, The Boondocks, Family
Guy, Futurama, Robot Chicken, and Aqua Teen Hunger Force are known for their black humor,
and have sparked numerous controversies as a result.

31.2 Angry Young Men

The term Angry Young Men often applied to the British ‘kitchen sink’ playwrights of the 1950s and
also anyone, particularly young men obviously, who rails against the establishment.

31.2.1 Origin
The term was applied most notably to John Osbourne and it was from comments about his Look
Back in Anger, first performed in 1956, that the phrase became known. That wasn’t its first use
though. In 1941, the writer Rebecca West used it in her Black lamb and grey falcon: the record of a journey
through Yugoslavia in 1937:
“Their [the Dalmatians] instinct is to brace themselves against any central authority as if it were
their enemy. The angry young men run about shouting.”

Notes West wasn’t using the phrase in the quite specific way it became used in the 1950s.
She was just referring to young men who were angry.

John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger was first performed in 1956. The term doesn’t appear in the
play but it was in the reporting of it later that it became known. In October 1957 George Fearon,
Press Officer for the Royal Court Theatre, wrote this piece for the Daily Telegraph:
“I had read John Osborne’s play. When I met the author I ventured to prophesy that his generation
would praise his play while mine would, in general, dislike it... ‘If this happens,’ I told him, ‘you
would become known as the Angry Young Man.’ In fact, we decided then and there that henceforth
he was to be known as that.”

The “angry young men” were a group of mostly working and middle class British playwrights
and novelists who became prominent in the 1950s. The group’s leading members included John
Osborne and Kingsley Amis. The phrase was originally coined by the Royal Court Theatre’s press
officer to promote John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. It is thought to be derived from the
autobiography of Leslie Paul, founder of the Woodcraft Folk, whose Angry Young Man was
published in 1951. Following the success of the Osborne play, the label was later applied by British

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