In the following essay, Kaufman contends that the divide between Kurt Vonnegut's comic persona and his cultural aims is obvious in many of his works, including Slapstick, Mother Night, and Cat's Cradle.

In the following essay, Trachtenberg discusses the emergence of a dark comic mode in American fiction during the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on common themes in the works of Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut.

In the following essay, Barnes provides several definitions of black humor, placing it in social and historical context, with special emphasis on the work of Kurt Vonnegut.

[Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.] is a Cosmic Fool, a clown who laughs at the world's failings and sorrows (and tries to tease, cajole and seduce us into laughing at them, too), rather than be overwhelmed by them (though sometimes it is touch and go). His satirical commentaries on business, war, politics, machine technology, organized religion, and organizations in general expose the foibles and inhumanities of a society of which he is always highly critical. Yet his satire and cosmic pessimism are paradoxically ...

[The] novel must cease taking itself seriously or perish…. Vonnegut has had what we now realize to be an advantage in this regard, since he began as a Pop writer, the author of "slick" fiction, written to earn money, which is to say, to fit formulas which are often genuine myths, frozen and waiting to be released. Fortunately, though he has sometimes written to suit the tastes of the middle-aged ladies who constitute the readership of the Ladies' Home Journal, he has tended more ...

There is a mystical, perhaps unnerving appeal in the way Vonnegut artistically maintains the clement aloofness that strangely accounts for much of his contemporaneity; but behind it all, behind the fantasy and the anti-establishmentarianism, is a deceptive fondness for the uncomplicated that enchants some readers, repels others, and seems downright anti-intellectual or, worse, silly to his least sympathetic critics. Which of the three reactions is most valid is a matter of taste or tastelessness (depending ...

Even from the experience of the modern century, which has already witnessed the killing of over one hundred million people in wars and death camps, political philosophers cannot conceive of a system of rule organized and sustained through violence. "No government based exclusively on the means of violence has ever existed," writes Hannah Arendt. It is a startling observation and one carrying the authority of Arendt's rich historical knowledge deepened by philosophical generosity. The as...

In the review below, Wood discusses the role of comedy in Fates Worse than Death.

With a certain facile agility, [Vonnegut] has gone genre jumping, assuming the colors, alternately, of short story writer, novelist, playwright, and sometime poet. Critics have attempted to trace an evolutionary pattern through various categories, techniques, styles, and points of view. Yet, however much the form varies, Vonnegut's very personal, readily identifiable products persist in their family resemblance…. Vonnegut entered literature through the door of science fiction, what some would ...

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 anyth...

In the following review, Clark argues that Fates Worse than Death lacks coherence.

Kurt Vonnegut's latest work, Jailbird, continues the trend of his two preceding works, Breakfast of Champions and Slapstick, away from sci fi entertainment towards satiric antinovels set in the sordid present and saturated with world-weary despair…. [Jailbird] opens with a rambling, autobiographical segment…. [But it becomes] a parodistic fairy tale spiced for grown ups with Dadaistic phantasies and with a moral dictated by black humor. In Jailbird Vonnegut operates as a satirical surge...

In the following review of Fates Worse than Death, Cunningham praises Vonnegut's wit in addressing the problems of modern American society.

Vonnegut expresses a relentessly pessimistic vision of man, a pessimism far surpassing the cynic's belief in the eventual victory of evil or the fundamentalist's version of a fall from grace. For there can be no victory without a battle and no fall if one from the start is inescapably mired at the bottom of the pit. The moral drama between right and wrong loses all meaning if men are not free to choose and competent to act, and Vonnegut sees man as neither competent nor free. In his fictional ...

In 1975 Kurt Vonnegut published a collection of reviews, articles and speeches under the annoying title of Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons. Now, six years later, he has done much the same in Palm Sunday. He calls the book a collage…. The result is far more effective than the earlier book. Indeed were it not for the 'connective tissue' Palm Sunday would be dangerously inconclusive and slight…. [Some] of the pieces included here are clearly no more than padding. There can be no ...

[Vonnegut] is a sardonic humorist and satirist in the vein of Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift. In earlier works, such as Player Piano, Cat's Cradle, and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, he has made fun of the worship of science and technology. Now we can see that his quarrel with contemporary society began with his experiences in World War II, about which he has at last managed to write a book [Slaughter-house-Five]…. Vonnegut never does get around to describing the raid on Dresden, and that shows ...

Part satirist and part visionary, Kurt Vonnegut … enjoys a sudden vogue since the late Sixties, particularly among youths disaffected with militarism, greed, and excessive rationality, with various ecological and technological disasters. A dark comedian even more than a satirist, Vonnegut expresses his rage, guilt, and compassion, his sense of being alive in a world of death, in frightening dystopias. But as sly prophet, he presents alternatives to the human condition in science fictions, disporting ...