Page 236 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

Unit 31: Black Comedy, Angry Young Men and Kitchen Sink Drama

newspapers to describe young British writers who were characterised by disillusionment with Notes
traditional English society. The term, always imprecise, began to have less meaning over the years
as the writers to whom it was originally applied became more divergent, and many of them
dismissed the label as useless.
Angry Young Men were various British novelists and playwrights who emerged in the 1950s and
expressed scorn and disaffection with the established sociopolitical order of their country. Their
impatience and resentment were especially aroused by what they perceived as the hypocrisy and
mediocrity of the upper and middle classes.
The Angry Young Men were a new breed of intellectuals who were mostly of working class or of
lower middle-class origin. Some had been educated at the postwar red-brick universities at the
state’s expense, though a few were from Oxford. They shared an outspoken irreverence for the
British class system, its traditional network of pedigreed families, and the elitist Oxford and
Cambridge universities. They showed an equally uninhibited disdain for the drabness of the
postwar welfare state, and their writings frequently expressed raw anger and frustration as the
postwar reforms failed to meet exalted aspirations for genuine change.
The trend that was evident in John Wain’s novel Hurry on Down (1953) and in Lucky Jim (1954) by
Kingsley Amis was crystallized in 1956 in the play Look Back in Anger, which became the
representative work of the movement. When the Royal Court Theatre’s press agent described the
play’s 26-year-old author John Osborne as an “angry young man,” the name was extended to all
his contemporaries who expressed rage at the persistence of class distinctions, pride in their
lower-class mannerisms, and dislike for anything highbrow or “phoney.”

Did u know? Sir Laurence Olivier played the leading role in Osborne’s second play, The
Entertainer (1957), the Angry Young Men were acknowledged as the dominant
literary force of the decade.
Their novels and plays typically feature a rootless, lower-middle or working-class male protagonist
who views society with scorn and sardonic humour and may have conflicts with authority but
who is nevertheless preoccupied with the quest for upward mobility.
Among the other writers embraced in the term are the novelists John Braine (Room at the Top, 1957)
and Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1958) and the playwrights Bernard Kops (The
Hamlet of Stepney Green, 1956) and Arnold Wesker (Chicken Soup with Barley, 1958). Like that of the Beat
movement in the United States, the impetus of the movement was exhausted in the early 1960s.

Task Write a short note on Angry Young Men.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. A .................... is a comic work that employs black humor or gallows humor.
2. The terms black comedy or dark comedy have been later derived as alternatives to .................... .
3. Black comedy employs a form of humor that may be known as .................... .
4. The .................... were a group of mostly working and middle class British playwrights and
novelists who became prominent in the 1950s.
5. The Angry young men were a new breed of intellectuals who were mostly of .................... .

31.3 Kitchen Sink Drama
The kitchen-sink drama is placed in an ordinary domestic setting and typically tells a relatively
mundane family story. Family tensions often come to the fore with realistic conflict between

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