The trouble with the Black Humorists is that they are not, as a rule, very humorous. They are, in fact, generally very depressing…. It is not necessarily the genre that is at fault but the execution. We have our classics of Black Humor which are very funny indeed. And if the young are said to admire them more than their elders it is because, as always, much of the cynicism goes over their pretty little heads. And even that is assuming—contrary to my observation—that the young read anything at all.

Kurt Vonnegut has risen, if that is the word, to Black Humor from an even more dubious genre, humorous science fiction, having put out a couple of volumes of it before he eased over into the main stream with his first "serious" novel, Cat's Cradle. This is a tale of the end of the world as...