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It suffered years of publisher’s delays, ran afoul of the censorship board and contributed to its author’s dangerously poor standing under the Vichy government, and in the final account earned Breton very little money at all. As to its philosophical impact, and despite Breton’s lifelong view of it as one of his major statements, the Anthology has never received the kind of attention granted most of his other books, making do instead, in the general response to Breton’s opus, with the condescending status of poor cousin. Who today – in the wake not only of the Theatre of the Absurd, but even more so of the writings of Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth, et al., not to mention Monty Python’s Flying Circus and its avatars, the films of David Lynch and the Coen brothers, or even such mainstream television fare as Saturday Night Live – could fail to recognize a distinct timeliness in the dark, acidic humour of Sade’s jovial Russian cannibal or Leonora Carrington’s party-going hyena, or with the dismissive whatever echoing from the selections by Rimbaud, Apollinaire, and Jacques Vaché? This relegation to the second tier is unjustified, for the Anthology of Black Humour not only gathers into one volume texts by many of Surrealism’s most important precursors and practitioners, but it still stands as the first and most coherent illustration of a form of humour that, as Breton notes in his introduction, has only gained in prominence since the concept was first codified. There is, in fact, a lot of what today we would call ‘attitude’ in these pages. This attitude, which takes the form of both a lampooning of social conventions and a profound disrespect for the nobility of literature, is perhaps the one thread that links these otherwise disparate writers: from Jonathan Swift’s famous, deadpan prescriptions for overpopulation to Jacques Rigaut’s nonchalant relations of his suicide attempts, from Charles Fourier’s delirious cosmogony to the mind-bending wordplay of Jean-Pierre Brisset and Marcel Duchamp, from Alphonse Allais’s neighbourly pranks and Alberto Savinio’s rude soirée to Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics and Charles Cros’s physics of love. If some of Breton’s choices (particularly those that most explicitly challenge the rules of ‘acceptable’ society) occasionally appear a bit heavy-handed, they nonetheless join with the others in subverting our expectations, upending our preconceived notions of life and art, and often – no small feat – making us laugh. This laughter, however, is always a little green around the edges, for as Breton is quick to point out, black humour is the opposite of joviality, wit, or sarcasm.

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Rather, it is a partly macabre, partly ironic, often absurd turn of spirit that constitutes the ‘mortal enemy of sentimentality,’ and beyond that a ‘superior revolt of the mind.’ Taking his cue from Freud’s remarks in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious – the Freudian terminology recurs throughout his presentations – he describes this form of humour as ‘the revenge of the pleasure principle (attached to the superego) over the reality principle (attached to the ego) … The hostility of the hypermoral superego toward the ego is thus transferred to the utterly amoral id and gives its destructive tendencies free rein.’ A recipe for psychic unrest, perhaps, but hardly the stuff of mirth.