The Dark Humour

An incisive, genre-defying exploration of melancholy from art, history, psychology, and beyond.

By turns scholastic, diagnostic, philosophical, literary, and satirical, The Dark Humour examines the range of human experience through the lens of melancholy. Riffing on Robert Burton’s seventeenth-century hybrid text The Anatomy of Melancholy, Maya Phillips dissects melancholy as an ailment and an aesthetic—from a literal condition of a time when there was no language for mental illness to its embrace by popular culture.

Humoural theory, Vincent van Gogh, Nine Inch Nails, T. S. Eliot, Hamlet, antidepressants, black holes, Freud, the blues—these are a few of Phillips’s surprising subjects, which also include interviews with a wide range of creatives and scholars, from writers to clinicians. A searching, empathic text by a writer both plagued and seduced by melancholy, The Dark Humour offers a compendium that proves we can share in its stupor and, in these pages, find delight and comfort without letting the mood overtake us.