The Anthology of Black Humor is a key book in the history of surrealism. The selection of the texts and the presentation of the authors is due to André Breton, the most relevant figure of the surrealist movement. Among the authors we find names as significant, and sometimes as surprising, as Swift, Sade, Carroll, Nietzsche, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Jarry, Roussel, Picabia, Picasso, Kafka, Duchamp, Vaché, Dalí and others.

We think it is interesting to highlight a fragment of Breton's prologue, which magnificently illustrates the spirit of the book: «To participate in the black humor tournament it is essential to have emerged victorious from numerous eliminatory rounds. Black humor has too many boundaries: nonsense, skeptical irony, jokes without gravity... (the list would be long), but, above all, it is the mortal enemy of sentimentality with a perpetually cornered air – eternal sentimentalism on a blue background. – and a certain short-lived fantasy, which is too often taken for poetry, vainly persists in wanting to subject the spirit to its outdated artifices, and which no longer has much time to raise above the sun, among the other seeds of poppy, its head like a crowned crane.