Word.ws English Dictionary

gallows humor

gallows humor noun: a form of comedy that still manages to be humorous in the face of, and in response to, a tragic or hopeless situation.

Noun

gallows humor (uncountable)

  1. (US, idiomatic) A form of comedy that still manages to be humorous in the face of, and in response to, a tragic or hopeless situation.
    • Author Neumann defiantly admits why he wrote this historical-romantic farce: "Because I wanted to fight against the general and my personal depression, and because in hard and bad times there is always one tragicomic feeling in place—gallows humor."1931, "German Falstaff" (review of The Mirror of Fools by Alfred Neumann), Time, 16 Jan.
    • The term was part of the language before Freud wrote an essay on it -- 'gallows humour.' This is middle European humour, a response to hopeless situations. It's what a man says faced with a perfectly hopeless situation and he still manages to say something funny. Freud gives examples: A man being...1971, Kurt Vonnegut, “Running Experiments Off: An Interview”, in Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut

Examples of gallows humor in a sentence

  • True enough, there are such things as laughless jokes, what Freud called gallows humor. . . .2005, Kurt Vonnegut, A Man without a Country, →ISBN, page 5:
  • Already engaging in gallows humor, I wondered if Mattis was defecting.2020 June 23, John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened, →ISBN, page 142:

Forms of gallows humor

alternative Commonwealthgallows humour

Questions about gallows humor

What does gallows humor mean?
Gallows humor means a form of comedy that still manages to be humorous in the face of, and in response to, a tragic or hopeless situation.
How do you use gallows humor in a sentence?
True enough, there are such things as laughless jokes, what Freud called gallows humor. . . .
What part of speech is gallows humor?
Gallows humor is a noun.

Words near gallows humor in the dictionary

  1. gallows birds
  2. gallows frame
  3. gallows frames
  4. gallows god
  5. gallows gods
  6. gallows humor
  7. gallows humour
  8. gallows tree
  9. gallows trees
  10. gallows-bird
  11. gallows-birds

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gallows humor (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-gallows humor.ogg.

Cite this entry: “gallows humor.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/gallows_humor. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.