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Black Comedy: Difference between revisions
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* The ''[[Durarara]]'' manga features "manga torture" conducted by otaku [[Torture Technician|torture technicians]]. It involves having the victim selecting a manga, and then they get tortured by a means taken from that work. What truly makes it Black Comedy is how the torturers declare that, really, [[New Media Are Evil|the content of the manga has absolutely nothing to do with it]]. They're just sick, sick people who, if they weren't otaku, would have had other interests -- interests that they would be equally good at turning into demented tortures.
* Appears occasionally in ''[[Paranoia Agent]]'' -- most noticeably the episode titled "Happy Family Planning", about a group of people trying to kill themselves after making an internet suicide pact. Believe it or not, it's the [[Crowning Moment of Funny|Crowning Episode Of Funny]] of the series.
* A few of the games the gang plays in ''[[Higurashi no Naku Koro ni]]'' counts as this. Once they talked about what they would use if they were to kill someone and how. Another time Mion sent everyone to look for body pieces at the dump. Knowing the series, this is usually foreshadowing or a plot point.
* For the most part, ''[[Angel Beats]]'' invokes [[Immortal Life Is Cheap]]. This means that a lot of presumed deaths, particularly the [[Dwindling Party]] scenes in episodes 2 and 8, are played for laughs.
* ''[[Oruchuban Ebichu]]'' was outright designed to push the envelope as to what could be aired in the Japanese late night slot. As said in its entry, Ebichu has a long tendency of interrupting the protagonists ''in flagrante delicto''...
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* Both the comic and film versions of ''[[Kick-Ass]]'' get a lot of mileage out of this trope, showing just just how violent and psychotic a person would have to be to actually pull it off as a superhero.
* Many stories by [[Wilhelm Busch]], like ''[[Max Und Moritz]]''.
* ''Clarissa'', also know as ''Family Portrait'', is a comic about a young girl who is the victim of [[Parental Incest]] and whose family are a classic case of 50s [[Stepford Smiler]]'s. It's not as amusing as other examples but can still be sickeningly funny.
* Belgian comic ''Violine'' definitely qualifies. Ten-year-old Violine has the ability to read people's minds by looking into their eyes. Her adventures include rescuing mice from being dissected (she even sees one cut open, and vomits), being thought of as a witch and chased by people who want her dead, hopping into a car with a pedophile (and seeing an image of herself bound and gagged and looking terrified when reading his mind), being thrown off a ship that she got caught stowing away on by a crew that assumes she's dead, witnessing the dead bodies of many birds caught in an oil spill, being chased by men with guns who then get eaten by alligators, and many more. All of this is played for very dark humor. Or you could possibly interpret it as a serious story that just has dark jokes scattered throughout, but either way, the sources of humor are pretty morbid.
* Evan Dorkin's "Milk and Cheese" series were about two hyperviolent dairy products who spend every strip they were ever in beat the ever loving shit out of everything they hate. And they hate everything except for liquor, TV, and each other. It's actually hard to describe the level of brutality involved. To put it in context, at one point, a guy from the Guinness Book of World Records shows as they're beating a hippy pot dealer to a bloody mess and crowns them as "World Class Abuse Kings".
* Icelandic playwright/cartoonist Hugleikur Dagsson's crudely-drawn cartoons include such savory topics as incest, coprophagia, bestiality, suicide, and adults intentionally putting children in harms way. [http://www.dagsson.com Check it out if you dare ].
* In ''Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on a Serious Earth'' Joker starts a joke "How many brittle bone babies does it take-" only for Batman to cut across him. Admittedly not dead babies but clearly the same pitch black comedy.
* ''[[Twisted Toyfare Theater]]''
* The original ''[[The Mask (comics)|The Mask]]'' comics often bordered on this.
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* ''[[Arsenic and Old Lace]]'' is a madcap comedy about a newlywed theater critic who discovers that his elderly [[Maiden Aunt|Maiden Aunts]] are [[Serial Killer|Serial Killers]] who regularly poison their gentlemen callers. Add a violently psychotic older brother to the mix, stir with some [[Police Are Useless|utterly oblivious police]], and season with copious amounts of [[Lampshade Hanging]].
* ''[[Being There]]'' (and its source novella) starts with the death of an old businessman and the expulsion of his mentally challenged gardener into an outside world he's never seen beyond its presentation on TV. The story that ensues has him rise to considerable power solely because most of the people he encounters don't realize he's an idiot and interpret his comments about gardening as metaphors. And there's more death to come as he becomes the confidante of a dying billionaire... Distressing on the surface, extremely funny and touching in its execution.
* Terry Gilliam's ''[[Brazil (film)|Brazil]]'' lives this trope, unless you're watching the [[Executive Meddling|"Love Conquers All"]] edit.
* ''[[Burke and Hare]]'', a comedy that is ''very loosely'' based on the real-life murderers.
* ''[[Dr. Strangelove]] (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb)''. Also a touch of [[Gallows Humor]] on [[Stanley Kubrick|the director's]] part, since it was made at a time when [[The End of the World as We Know It|nuclear war]] was a very real possibility. The filmmakers originally started to it a serious film about an accidental nuclear war, but they didn't want to make it seem like they were copying ''Failsafe'' and decided to change it to a comedy. Notably, [[Enforced Method Acting|they didn't tell Slim Pickins]], so his performance was completely straight.
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* ''[[Grosse Pointe Blank]]'': So, when you go back to your high school reunion and everyone asks what you do now, do you tell them you're a hitman or not?
* ''[[Heathers]]'': A film about getting your own back on highschool bullies by engineering their murders and making them look like suicides.
* Paddy Chayevski's 1970 film ''The Hospital'' has doctors dying from unusual causes, while at the same time the Chief of Surgery (George C. Scott) is so despondent over the meaninglessness of life, as well as being impotent, he's trying to kill himself, until he rapes the daughter of a patient at which point he realizes he does have a reason to live!
* ''[[The House of Yes]]'' could be called a Dead President Comedy the way it plays with the JFK assassination. The character in question is an [[Ax Crazy]] [[Nightmare Fetishist]] with [[Villainous Incest|a sever fixation on her blue-blood brother]]. This can be viewed as Anvilicious Black Comedy, or outright [[Fetish Fuel]], but it's a definite case of [[Crosses the Line Twice]].
* ''[[In Bruges]]'' In a film about two hitmen on the run after one of them botched a hit by shooting an innocent child, who spends his time drinking and contemplating suicide the only humour you'd expect to find is the black kind.
* ''[[Inglourious Basterds]]'': Mostly the parts with the Basterds and the scenes with Hitler, though the film as a whole is more of a dramedy.
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* The two [[Tales from the Crypt]] theatrical movies ''[[Demon Knight]]'' and ''[[Bordello of Blood]]'' are full of this.
* ''[[Temptation Island]]''
* ''[[The Room]]'' according to [[Word of God]], but not according to anyone else. After it became clear that what was clearly intended to be a moving romantic drama was in fact reducing audiences to tears of laughter at the [[So Bad It's Good]] factor, Tommy Wiseau has since taken to describing his masterwork as a "black comedy", apparently as some kind of face-saving exercise.
* The aptly titled ''[[Very Bad Things]]'', in which the emotional toll of the protagonist's preparations for his impending wedding to a [[Bridezilla]] is compounded by the accidental death of a hooker at his bachelor party and the resulting ever-worsening train wreck of bad decisions and bad luck which, by the end of the movie, has ruined the lives of everyone it hasn't killed.
* ''[[The War of the Roses (film)|The War of the Roses]]''
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* [[Shadow Of A Vampire]]: is a darkly humourous film re-imagining Murnau's horror classic [[Nosferatu]] as being shot starring a real vampire. At the end {{spoiler|the vampire kills most of the cast ''and Murnau keeps the camera rolling.''}}
* ''Happiness (1998)'' is this through and through. Particularly with it's portrayal of pedophilia and what a ''[[Dysfunction Junction]]'' it all is.
* The [[Alfred Hitchcock]] comedy ''[[The Trouble with Harry]]''.
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* Any of [[Derek Robinson]]'s novels. The war novels are more black than comedy, but the spy novels are more comedy than black (but still pretty black).
* There is saying mentioned in one of stories from Žamboch: Hope dies penultimate. What remains till the end is dark humour.
* William Faulkner excels at this. Anyone ever read "As I Lay Dying"? The mother is dying as the book opens, her corpse gets holes drilled in its face and dropped in the river, the eldest son has his leg broken and casted up with cement(he loses the leg and cannot continue his carpentry profession), the only "sane" one is put in a mental institute, the daughter is given fake abortion pills, and the youngest son confuses his mother with a fish.
* Everything [[Bret Easton Ellis]] writes falls under this trope.
* ''The Late Hector Kipling'' by David Thewlis. Throughout all the tragedy that the main character has to deal with, he finds himself unable to respond "properly" to it, to be sad and grieve like any other person would, which leads to bizarre situations and conversations. A large chunk of the book is actually about his hope that {{spoiler|someone close to him would die already}}.
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** [[Stephen King]] novels in general. The bits that aren't [[Nightmare Fuel]] are this trope. Sometimes they even go side-by-side.
* The story ''Daedalus and Icarus'' from Ovid's [[The Metamorphoses]], although the humor has been [[Lost in Translation]].
* In Lawrence Block's novel ''[[Ariel (novel)|Ariel]]'', Ariel's friend Erskine has a proclivity for this.
* Hillaire Belloc's ''Cautionary Tales for Children'' is in part just that: a book of poems where bad things happen to children who do bad things—[[Can't Get Away with Nuthin'|no matter how trivial]]. Really, though, Belloc makes their punishments absurd to make for better comedy.
* ''[[Alice in Wonderland]]'' and ''[[Alice in Wonderland|Through the Looking Glass]]'' are filled with grim jokes about injury and death. For example, this passage from the first chapter of the first book:
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* [[It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia]] fills its episodes with taboo comedy, riffing on such topics as dumpster babies, statutory rape, crack addiction, and cannibalism.
* ''[[Pushing Daisies]]'' seemed like the writers were competing to make the most gruesome death imaginable while still counting as slapstick.
* ''[[30 Rock|Thirty Rock]]'' has a continuing story arc where Jack's wife Avery is kidnapped in North Korea and forced to marry Kim Jong Il's son. It is suggested that she is being brainwashed and raped while in captivity.
* ''[[Dead Like Me]]'' did this as well. The first guy reaped (besides George) comes in at the tail end of a bank holdup in which no less than two guns are being waved around and the entire top floor explodes. {{spoiler|The victim dies slipping on a banana peel.}}
* ''[[The X-Files]]'' episode "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose," is [[Actually Pretty Funny|surprisingly funny]] considering its all about the terrible [[Nightmare Fuel]] that results from being able to see the future accurately and the inevitability of death. Very, very grim. [[Crowning Moment of Funny|But also very, very funny]].
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* ''Laid'', a 2011 Australian series about a woman who discovers that her former lovers have started dying in various strange and unexpected circumstances.
* [[Tales from the Crypt]]
* ''[[The Night Shift]]'' doesn't deal specifically with death, but it's like ''[[The Office]]'' [[This Is Your Premise on Drugs|off its meds]] and stars a [[Dysfunction Junction]]. The viewpoint character is clinically depressed, [[The Ditz]] is too incompetent to ever live a normal life and tragically waiting for a dream that can never come true, and the [[Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist]] [[Jaded Washout]] is a "psycho" whose issues with his [[Abusive Parents]] are [[Cerebus Syndrome|examined seriously]] and [[Deconstructed Trope|deconstructed]] in [[The Movie]].
* In Britain, [[Chris Morris]]'s show ''[[Jam]]'' depended almost entirely on this, even featuring a dead baby. Another of his shows, ''[[Brass Eye]]'', infamously went too far with its "Paedophilia special" and received numerous complaints. Many of these, strangely enough, happened to be from the kind of people and newspapers who the show was satirising in the first place - the News of the World and the Daily Mail acted far more bent out of shape than the Times and the Guardian. Getting celebrities to discuss the implications of a "roboplegic wrongcock" (a paralysed paedophile with cybernetic implants that let him chase children) on television is inherently funny, though.
** ''The Adam and Joe Show'' featured a ''Jam'' parody with a send-up of the dead baby sketch. Adam played a TV repairman who finds a dead baby behind the set and says he will have to [[Dude, Not Funny|rape the corpse]] in order to repair the television. A horrified Joe refuses to film any more, and storms off the set while Adam complains that "you don't understand my genius"
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* ''[[Seinfeld]]''.
** Season 7 ended {{spoiler|with the unexpected death of George's fiance, Susan (from licking toxic glue from cheep wedding invitations he picked out). His reaction? A moment of silence, followed by going out with his friends for coffee. ''It Gets Worse''. During the post-credits scene, he calls another woman, tells her his fiance recently died, and asks if she's free this weekend.}}
*** Jason Alexander (who played George) himself has said he feels that Seinfeld is "a very dark show about very dark people".
{{quote|''Did a dingo eat your baby?''}}
* Oz's band in [[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]] is called Dingoes Ate My Baby, a reference to the real life tragedy made famous by the movie ''A Cry In The Dark''.
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* Justified on [[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]. The title character sacrifices her life to save [[The Not Love Interest|Dawn]] (and [[Always Save the Girl|the world,]] only for her friends to rip her from heaven. Buffy reacts to this noble yet traumatizing act by; among other things, using [[Dead Baby Comedy]] as a coping mechanism. [[Dude, Not Funny|Buffy's friends catch on,]] making this [[Played for Drama]].
* ''1000 Ways To Die'', especially in its later episodes. As one tagline put it: "We glorify stupidity and put a smiley face on Death".
* As the title might suggest, ''[[One Foot in the Grave]]'' was a [[Britcom]] about [[Reluctant Retiree]] Victor Meldrew looking for ways to occupy his time and featured an uncommonly large amount of material, [[Mood Whiplash|humour and otherwise]], touching on old age, death, loneliness and having to [[Humans Are Bastards|put up with everyone else]].
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* [["Weird Al" Yankovic]]'s [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AKRqDtzOlQ "Mr. Frump in the Iron Lung"] which should not be funny but really is.
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ak0_fa1DDpc "Dead Puppies Aren't Much Fun"] by Ogden Edsel. The title is [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|self explanatory]] so why is it so amusing?
* A good chunk of [[The Velvet Underground]]'s ''White Light/White Heat''. "The Gift", "Lady Godiva's Operation" and "Sister Ray" all have characters indulging in activities that end in somebody getting killed, all while the stories are narrated in a deadpan, if not outright playful, tone.
== New Media ==
* Although many stories from ''[[The Onion]]'' don't involve this, quite a lot do. Their book ''Our Dumb World'' is a landmark in the history of black comedy literature, as it succeeds in brutally mocking every nation on the planet.
* Globe Magazine is a tabloid magazine that often [[Blatant Lies|completely fabricates]] stories about celebrities. Oftentimes, it gets past the line that's accepted as satire i.e. [[The Onion]], into making unsubstantiated and vicious rumors about celebrities. They [[Moral Event Horizon|reached a low even more vicious than usual]] by making their front-page article titled "[http://www.globemagazine.com/story/526 Who will die first?], and [http://gossiponthis.com/2010/06/09/globe-magazine-releases-gary-coleman-death-photos/ publishing the deathbed photos of Gary Coleman].
* This very page has shown various Google ads that qualify as this due to the juxtaposition, ranging from a pregnancy calendar to "5 Ways to Help Baby Sleep". "Intelligent keywords" are comedy gold.
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{{quote|'''First Musician:''' What a pestilent knave is this same!
'''Second Musician:''' Hang him, Jack! }}
* ''[[Little Shop of Horrors]]'' has plenty of this, since Audrey II is both horrifying and hysterical.
* ''[[Avenue Q]]''. About three across-the-line jokes per song. Assuming the line is pretty far away from "tasteful". "[[The Internet Is for Porn]] ..."
* Sarah Kane's play 'Blasted' takes this trope one step further: Ian, one of the main characters, eats a dead baby. He is also a racist, alcoholic rapist who has had his eyes eaten by a soldier who raped him with a gun.
* Despite (or maybe because of) the fact that [[
* The classic Punch and Judy puppet show, especially in its harsher incarnations, is an [[Older Than Radio]] example.
* Every single production by Pittsburgh-based theatre company Rage of the Stage falls into this category. Their [[Crowning Moment of Awesome]] was a ''[[Wizard of Oz]]'' adaptation featuring a mentally insane and heavily medicated Dorothy, a heroin-addicted Scarecrow, and a sex-obsessed Lion.
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* ''[[Planescape: Torment]]'' revels in black comedy, much of it based around the protagonist and his immortality. You can win an argument with a man espousing the glories of the afterlife by ''snapping your own neck'', dropping dead, then standing up minutes later and saying, "All right, now it's your turn." Or hit on a female zombie and then bicker with your [[The Lancer|Lancer]] about which of the pair of you she was most into.
** You can also order an NPC to crack open your skull to look if there is anything inside. You then write into your journal "there wasn't".
* ''[[
** A mountain of excrement.
** The [[Boss Battle]] of said mountain of excrement, [http://sloprano.ytmnd.com/ the Great Mighty Poo.] Warning, link swears.
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* [[Heroic Armies Marching|HAM]] likes this trope, allowing you to send goblin babies into battle. The lore describes them as being so weak, their skin peels off like wet paper.
** A less harsh example: Shit Golems.
* [[Tropico]] 4. The entire game. You see, it's a Cold War. You're the dictator of a Banana Republic, and you're ultimately a pawn in a much larger game between the US and the USSR. Your people aren't exactly cooperative, nor they are very bright. You can't stay in power (for long) lest you Kick the Dog on regular basis. This culminates when you sell your island to the US to test nuclear bombs: your Announcer Chatter will say that "according to the scientists, the big shiny mushroom is harmless, and it's good for the skin tone", your history involves the worst in people (Being the only true graduate of every Harvard Grad in your class, where you have to be a pathetic banana republic dictator, your buddies go on to be POTUS).
* Eggman's PA announcements in ''[[Sonic Colors]]'' are absolutely full of this. To quote one example:
{{quote|"Next stop, the Tropical Resort. Here, you will find: breath-taking views from our giant ferris wheel, amazing deals from our shopping mall, and [[Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick|constant risk of bodily harm.]]" }}
* ''[[Tales of the Abyss]]'' towards Guy's fear of women. During a good portion of the game, whenever a girl comes very close to him (especially if they touch him) he recoils in fear and starts screaming. ''Hilarious'', and becomes a [[Running Gag]] But then we learn why he's so afraid of contact with women... {{spoiler|When he was young, his home, Hod, was being attacked by Duke fon Fabre's men. Guy was hidden inside a (Thankfully extinguished) fireplace by his older sister and the house maids, and then the soldiers came in. In order to protect him, Guy's sister and the maids threw themselves onto Guy as the soldiers killed them all. He passed out, but when he came to, he was smothered in a pile of dead women}}. Suffice to say, [[Dude, Not Funny|nobody was laughing after that]].
== Webcomics ==
* ''[[8-Bit Theater
** The sister comic, ''Warbot In Accounting'' includes an example. The eponymous warbot, in an attempt to become a father, buys a kit to build a robot, only to produce a distorted, agonized thing. Warbot proceeds to dump the malformed baby robot in the trash.
*** "It's so dark, daddy. So daaaaaaark...."
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** Let's not forget Tearjerker's contingency movie: "Six hours of a baby chimp trying to revive its dead mother!"
* ''[[Invader Zim]]'': Only [[Jhonen Vasquez]] could make the hostile alien takeover of our world so twistedly funny.
* [[Aaahh Real Monsters]]: Its gross humor and demonic running gags are truly a dead giveaway.
* ''[[Futurama]]''.
** There's an episode where Bender adopts a dozen orphans and then attempts to sell them to a restaurant as meat.
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** From the same episode: Captain Hero wipes out his species out of SPITE.
{{quote|'''Captain Hero:''' Captain hero ONE! Billions of innocent Zebulonians...um...dead. Oh. I...uh...(Slinks off)}}
* ''[[Courage the Cowardly Dog]]'': Courage & his owners Eustace, and Muriel Bagge constantly run into monsters, aliens, demons, mad scientists, zombies, and island natives that Courage must fend off to save his owners. Eustace always ends up being attacked by all the horrors in the series.
* ''[[The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy]]''
{{quote|'''Grim''': (Baby voice) Who's gonna get reaped? Who's gonna get reaped? You are! You are!
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'''Grim''': Ahahaha! This is more fun than the French Revolution!
'''Grim''': Actually, I'm scheduled to see you next week, Mr. Teetermeyer! }}
** ...And that's just one character.
* ''[[Moral Orel]]'', which occasionally decides to drop the "comedy" part; it left it to die in a ditch for most of the last season.
* ''[[Jimmy Two-Shoes]]''. More subtle than the above examples, but still there.
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** One well-known example from an earlier episode occurs in "Homer's Enemy".
** In the movie, Bart plays a game that involving blasting down babies. Maggie is not pleased... seemingly because Bart stolen her game (she is implied to be playing the game later).
* The [[Jump the Shark|later episodes of]] The [[Fairly Oddparents]]. Let's see [[Domestic Abuse]] ''JOKES'' (To the point where the main character [[Harmful to Minors|is an abused 10 year old]]) [[Once an Episode]], the setting is a [[Crapsack World]], most [[Shallow Parody|parodies are shallow]], [[Take That]], ect. In the episode, "Spellelementry", [[Goo-Goo Godlike|Poof]] finds the [[Dem Bones|skeleton]] of a dead baby. That's just the tip of the iceberg.
* ''[[Phineas and Ferb]]'' uses this in relation to Dr. Doofenshmirtz's [[Hilariously Abusive Childhood]].
** When they went to the museum, there was a dog skeleton on display with a collar that says "Bucky." Phineas says that they had a dog named Bucky who got sick and went to live on kindly Old Man Simmons's farm. Their dad hurries them along to the next display, which is {{spoiler|kindly Old Man Simmons.}}
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* Q: Why did that kid fell off the swing? A: Because he has not arms!
** Q: And why did nobody help him to get up? A: Because he has no friends!
* Relatively similar and equally repellent are Helen Keller jokes: Q: How did Helen Keller burn her fingers? A: By reading the waffle iron. And countless others.
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* CTF, or Cletus the Fetus is an obscure black comedy medical term for a baby born at 23 weeks, where the survival rate is less than 1%. There have been no cases of a baby surviving birth before 22 weeks, confirming [[Makes Sense in Context|doctors may have the blackest of all humor]].
* Tim Horton, famous hockey player for the Toronto Maple Leafs, and founder of the wildly famous donut and coffee store; Tim Hortons. One day he was driving through the streets of St. Catharines Ontario extremly drunk. He went under the lake St. Overpass at around 150Kmh in his car and hit a support column. He and his car were obliterated. To this day, you can still find Tim-Bits everywhere.
* [[Christopher Hitchens]] combined this with a [[Take That]] at Princess Diana:
{{quote|'''Hitchens:''' The thing about mine fields is that they're very easy to lay, but they're very difficult and dangerous, and even expensive to get rid of' - the perfect description of Prince Charles's first wife.}}
** In turn, a joke circualted about Hitchens immediately after his death by those less than fond of him went as such:
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