Gallows humor
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Gallows humor is a type of humor that arises from stressful, traumatic or life-threatening situations such as accidents, wartime events, natural disasters; often in circumstances where death is perceived as impending and unavoidable. It is similar to black comedy but differs in that it is made by the person affected.
Examples
From Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet, Act 3 scene 1:
- Mercutio is stabbed in a swordfight by Tybalt, Juliet's cousin.
- Romeo: "Courage, man; the hurt cannot be much."
- Mercutio: "No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve: ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man."
As Sir Thomas More climbed a rickety scaffold where he would be executed, he said to his executioner:
- "I pray you, Mr Lieutenant, see me safe up; and for my coming down, let me shift for myself."
Immediately after the signing of the Declaration of Independence of the United States, but before the wars that secured independence, Benjamin Franklin is known to have said the following in danger of being accused of high treason to his fellow, often fractious delegates:
- "We must all hang together or, assuredly, we will all hang separately."
After her career had declined and she had started aging, actress Tallulah Bankhead would answer the question
- "Are you Tallulah Bankhead?" with
- "No, darling, I'm what's left of her."
Author and playwright Oscar Wilde was destitute and living in a cheap boarding house when he found himself on his deathbed. There are variations on what the sentence exactly was, but his reputed last words were
- "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death; one or the other of us has got to go."
