Noun

1. Comedy that makes light of death or other very serious matters.
   • 1931, "German Falstaff" (review of The Mirror of Fools by Alfred Neumann), Time, 16 Jan.,

     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."

   • 2005, Kurt Vonnegut, A Man without a Country, ISBN 9781583227138, p. 5,

     True enough, there are such things as laughless jokes, what Freud called gallows humor. . . . While we were being bombed in Dresden, sitting in a cellar with our arms over our heads in case the ceiling fell, one soldier said as though he were duchess in a mansion on a cold and rainy night, "I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight."