Black Comedy

Black comedy, also known as black humor or dark comedy, is a sub-genre of comedy and satire where topics and events that are usually treated seriously – death, mass murder, sickness, madness, terror, drug abuse, rape, war etc. – are treated in a humorous or satirical manner. Synonyms include dark humor, morbid humor, gallows humor and off-color humor.

Black comedy is similar to sick comedy, such as dead body jokes. However, in sick humor most of the humor comes from shock and revulsion; black humor usually includes an element of irony, or even fatalism. This particular brand of humor can be exemplified by a scene in the play Waiting for Godot: A man takes off his belt to hang himself, and his trousers fall down. Another example, "Suicide just isn't funny, no matter which way you slice it," is an effective satire at the way that suicide is treated in mainstream western culture, insinuating that attitudes towards suicide are even more morose or morbid than the act or mental condition leading to it.

In America, black comedy as a literary genre came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. Writers such as Terry Southern, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Harlan Ellison and Eric Nicol have written and published novels, stories and plays where profound or horrific events were portrayed in a comic manner. An anthology edited by Bruce Jay Friedman, titled "Black Humour," assembles many examples of the genre.

The 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb presents one of the best-known examples of black comedy. The subject of the film is nuclear war and the extinction of life on Earth. Normally, dramas about nuclear war treat the subject with gravity and seriousness, creating suspense over the efforts to avoid a nuclear war. But Dr. Strangelove plays the subject for laughs; for example, in the film, the fail-safe procedures designed to prevent a nuclear war are precisely the systems that ensure that it will happen. The film Fail-Safe, produced simultaneously, tells a largely identical story with a distinctly grave tone; the film The Bed-Sitting Room, released six years later, treats post-nuclear English society in an even wilder comic approach.

Today, black comedy can be found in almost all forms of media.

Works

Literature

(Some of these have been adapted to television or film as well.)

• American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis

• The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race by J. G. Ballard

• The Book of Bunny Suicides by Andy Riley

• Candide by Voltaire

• A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr., a post-apocalyptic novel that combines dark humor with more serious discussion of the consequences of nuclear war and the fallen nature of man.

• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.

• Chimera and other novels by John Barth

• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, the true story of his drug fueled trip to Las Vegas with his "attorney".

• Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk, and his other works.

• Herbert West: Reanimator by H. P. Lovecraft

• Jennifer Government by Max Barry

• Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and other works of his.

• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, a tragicomedy about a middle-aged man who has an obsessive relationship with a 12-year old girl

• M*A*S*H by Richard Hooker

• Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West, a novella concerning the travails of a depressive advice columnist.

• A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift

• The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh

• A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket, a series of children's books about three orphans who go through many tragic and unfortunate experiences.

• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, an anti-war speculative fiction novel loosely based on Vonnegut's experiences as an American POW.

• Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare

• The Toy Collector by James Gunn

• The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks.

• Most of the short stories contained in the collections Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison

• Any of the six wartime aviation novels by Derek Robinson: Goshawk Squadron, Piece of Cake, War Story, A Good Clean Fight, Hornet's Sting, and Damned Good Show

Films

• The Addams Family and Addams Family Values both directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, based on the cartoons of Charles Addams and the televison series.

• A Bucket of Blood, directed by Roger Corman, is about a busboy who becomes a success in the art world after accidentally killing his landlady's cat and covering it up in clay to hide the evidence. When he is pressured to deliver similar work, people start mysteriously disappearing. Remade in 1995.

• About Schmidt, the meaning of one's life after retirement.

• After Hours

• American Beauty is about Lester Burnham's (Kevin Spacey) last few weeks on Earth, with storylines of affairs, ephebophilia, drugs and homophobia.

• "American Pyscho", a rich yuppy working on the stock exchange, goes on a killing rampage. Storyline inlcuding homophobia and vanity.

• Arsenic and Old Lace is about a pair of murdering old aunts discovered by their nephew, played by Cary Grant.

• Bad Santa is about a wretched, drunk, perverse thief who poses as a mall Santa Claus to rip off department stores.

• The Bed-Sitting Room, about life in England after a nuclear war.

• Being John Malkovich, a comedy dealing with identity, greed, lust, fame, transexualism, and exploitation.

• The Big Lebowski, in which the shiftless "Dude" deals with bowling, nihilists, kidnapping, death, and having his favorite rug urinated on.

• Brassed Off, about the brass band of a Yorkshire mining village, in the days when the mine closes. Those not familiar with the problems covered in the film often mistake it for a standard comedy film.

• Brazil a comedic vision of a nightmarish 1984-like world of bureaucracy gone awry, featuring terrorism, torture, secrecy and paperwork.

• The Cable Guy, a film starring Jim Carrey and Matthew Broderick about a man stalked by the psychotic cable company worker he makes friends with.

• Cannibal! The Musical, a comical take on the story of Alfred Packer, the first American convicted of cannibalism

• Catch-22, based on the book by Joseph Heller. Directed by Mike Nichols.

• Children Of The Revolution, about the 'love child' of Josef Stalin.

• The Chumscrubber

• Citizen Ruth, a satire about the abortion rights battle.

• Corpse Bride, a young man named Victor Van Dort finds himself accidentally married to a corpse, and is thrown headfirst into the Land of the Dead, which turns out to be much more colorful than the land of the living.

• Crazy People

• La Comunidad

• Dead Alive, about a man that has to keep his mother from eating people after she becomes a zombie.

• Dead Man On Campus, about the urban legend of a roommate's suicide and the resulting perfect grades in college

• Death Becomes Her, about the downsides of immortality.

• Death To Smoochy, a corrupt former children's TV icon plots revenge against his fuzzy purple replacement.

• Delicatessen, about a former circus performer who works at an apartment building with cannibalistic tenants.

• Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a satirical film about an insane American General who orders a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, filmed during the Cold War.

• Drop Dead Gorgeous, a parody of a beauty pageant for teenage girls in a small Minnesota town.

• Duplex, a couple move into a house and try to get their annoying elderly neighbor to die.

• Eating Raoul, about a prudish couple who kill rich swingers by luring them to their apartment.

• Election about a young teen who obsesses over becoming class president, and her teacher, who finds himself actually trying to foil her. Contains element of ephebophilia, lesbianism, drug abuse, and statutory rape.

• Eulogy, which follows a young woman (Zooey Deschanel) and her dysfunctional family in the days leading up to her grandfather's funeral.

• Evil Dead, Evil Dead II, & Army of Darkness, a series of action/horror movies with a comedic twist about "The Book of the Dead".

• Fargo, a debt-ridden car salesman hires incompetent criminals to kidnap his wife in order to get a ransom from his rich father-in-law.

• Fight Club

• Four Rooms, four vignettes centered around a hapless bell boy, involving witchcraft, a rotting corpse, and a severed finger.

• Full Metal Jacket, about war in vietnam

• Ghost World, two girls graduate high-school and take separate paths while sharing the same cynical view of the world.

• Grace Quigley, a film about euthanasia

• Grosse Pointe Blank, about a hit man who returns to his hometown to attend his high school reunion.

• Happiness deals unflinchingly with subjects designed to make audiences squirm (from suicide, rape and murder to pedophilia and childhood masturbation). The treatment of the subjects is blunt, but also gleefully absurdist.

• Harold and Maude, in which an alienated young man obsessed with staged suicides and the funerals of strangers falls in love with a vivacious octogenarian.

• The Hospital, the story of a chief of surgery who is trying to figure out why a number of hospital employees begin dying under strange circumstances.

• Heathers, about a disaffected, jaded couple who start killing members of popular cliques at their high school.

• Idiocracy; Private Joe Bowers (Wilson), the definition of "average American", is selected by the Pentagon to be the guinea pig for a top-secret hibernation program, set 1,000 years in the future. He discovers a society so incredibly dumbed-down that he's easily the most intelligent person alive.

• Intolerable Cruelty about a divorce attorney and a gold-digger.

• Jawbreaker three popular high school girls accidentally kill their best friend on her birthday, resulting in chaos

• Keeping Mum a housekeeper kills the inhabitants of a small English village who are "doing the wrong thing".

• Kind Hearts and Coronets, Ealing comedy in which the main character assassinates members of an aristocratic family to inherit a Dukedom.

• Kissed a Canadian film (1996) by Lynne Stopkewich with Molly Parker and Peter Outerbridge.

• The King of Comedy

• The Ladykillers (1955) and (2004) versions; a criminal professor tries to perform a sophisticated robbery while fooling an old woman.

• The Last Supper, about a group of liberal grad students who proceed to murder right-wing individuals they cannot reform.

• Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, about three orphans who go through many tragic experiences.

• The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou Bill Murray leads a group of explorers on a revenge mission to kill a shark.

• 'Little Miss Sunshine

• The Little Shop of Horrors, also directed by Roger Corman, features a nerd who resorts to murder in order to feed his blood-hungry talking plant. Remade as a musical, which later became a film in 1986.

• Little Murders

• Live Freaky!, Die Freaky!

• Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, a Guy Ritchie film about the seedy underside of London crime.

• Lolita - film version of the novel about a man obsessed with a young girl.

• LolliLove, mockumentary about a wealthy, egotistical couple who believe they can change the lives of homeless people by giving them a lollipop with a life-affirming message on it - includes actual homeless people in the cast, and humor around the holocaust, bulimia, cleft palates, AIDS, and so on.

• Loot by Joe Orton, dramatist of several black comedies.

• The Loved One, film version of the Waugh novel.

• M*A*S*H, about the irreverent antics of army surgical hospital personnel during the Korean War.

• Man Bites Dog, a disturbing mockumentary about a merciless hit man who takes a camera crew on a tour of his routine.

• Monsieur Verdoux, about a suave serial killer (Charlie Chaplin) who commits his crimes to support his family.

• My Life With Morrissey chronicles the adventures of an off-kilter office girl whose life unravels when she meet her idol (British Rock Icon Morrissey) and set off on a journey of obsessive self-delusion.

• Penn & Teller Get Killed, in which the comedians/magicians are tracked by an assassin trying to kill them.

• Pib and Pog created by Aardman, set up like an childrens program; invloves too characters trying to harm eachother to a great extent.

• Pretty Persuasion, in which a fifteen year old girl with a high IQ accuses her teacher of sexual abuse to rise to stardom.

• The Player, a satirical look at a Hollywood studio executive who is blackmailed for murder by an unknown screenwriter.

• Prizzi's Honor, in which a Mafia hit man and hit woman fall in love.

• The Royal Tenenbaums, in which a dysfunctional family of past-their-prime geniuses reunite for the first time in 23 years.

• The Ruling Class, about an insane British nobleman who thinks he's Jesus.

• Ruthless People, in which a businessman makes several failed attempts to kill is wife, and then celebrates when an inept husband and wife team kidnap her.

• Serial Mom, about a suburban housewife who happens to be a serial killer.

• Schizopolis, about a man working for a Scientology-like self-help corporation called Eventualism

• Sleeping Dogs Lie, about a girl whose relationships are destroyed when she reluctantly reveals that once, out of curiosity, she performed oral sex on her dog.

• S.O.B., about a film director who turns a family-oriented flop musical into a hit psycho-sexual thriller.

• Survive Style 5+, in which a man continually tries and fails to get his wife to stay dead - among other things.

• Swimming with Sharks

• Thank You for Smoking, about an unapologetic but arguably likeable lobbyist for the tobacco industry.

• The Grotesque, a British film (1995) by John-Paul Davidson after the novel by Patrick McGrath with Alan Bates, Lena Headey and Sting. Too whimsical to describe.

• Twin Town a British film made in Swansea, South Wales about two joy riders who take on revenge on "Bryn Cartwright" when their father "Fatty Lewis" falls off a ladder whilst doing a job for him.

• Throw Momma from the Train, a comedic retelling of Hitchcock's thriller Strangers on a Train.

• To Be or Not to Be, about the Nazi occupation of Poland during World War II. Remade in 1983.

• The Trouble with Harry follows several quirky residents of a small town as they deal with a dead body that has inconveniently turned up in a local park.

• The Toxic Avenger, a spoof of superheroes and horror movies.

• Very Bad Things, about a group of friends who accidentally kill a hooker and murder a bellhop during a bachelor party. After burying the bodies, they begin killing each other when they fear that one of them might confess.

• Visitor Q, absurdist, taboo-laden Japanese film with surprisingly moralistic undertones about the twisted redemption of a dysfunctional family involved in incest, rape, necrophilia, murder and mother-abuse.

• The War of the Roses, about a couple going through a nasty divorce while still trying to live in the same house.

• Weekend at Bernie's, in which two employees spend a weekend with the corpse of their former boss, while avoiding a mafia hit man and still trying to have fun and sexual misadventures.

• What Are You Doing After the Orgy?, Swedish film from 1970.

• The Wrong Box, from the story by Robert Louis Stevenson about the members of a tontine.

Periodicals

• The Baffler

• The Beast

• Carpe Noctum

• Harvard Lampoon

• Mad Magazine

• Might magazine

• National Lampoon

• The Onion

• Spy Magazine

Television

• The Addams Family

• 'Allo 'Allo!

• American Dad!

• Andy Richter Controls the Universe

• Arrested Development

• Beavis and Butthead

• Blackadder

• Brass Eye

• Chappelle's Show

• The Colbert Report

• Clone High

• Courage the Cowardly Dog

• Curb Your Enthusiasm

• The Daily Show

• Daria

• Dead Like Me

• Desperate Housewives

• Dog Bites Man

• Drawn Together

• Excel Saga

• Extras

• Family Guy

• Gary and Mike

• Get a Life

• Greg The Bunny

• The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy

• Home Movies

• Invader ZIM

• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

• Jaaaaam

• The John Larroquette Show

• Kids In The Hall

• Lucha va voom

• Paranoia Agent

• The League of Gentlemen

• The Podge and Rodge Show

• M*A*S*H

• MADtv

• Married...With Children

• Mission Hill

• Monkey Dust

• Monty Python's Flying Circus

• Moral Orel

• Mr. Show

• My Name is Earl

• Nightingales

• Nighty Night

• One Foot in the Grave

• Peep Show

• Ren and Stimpy

• Rescue Me

• Robot Chicken

• Saturday Night Live

• The Simpsons

• Six Feet Under

• Starved

• Space Goofs

• South Park

• Stella

• Steven Spielberg Presents Toonsylvania

• Strangers with Candy

• Titus

• The Boondocks

• Waiting For God

• Weeds

• Welcome to the NHK

• Wonder Showzen

Video games

• Carmageddon series

• Conker's Bad Fur Day

• Crash Tag Team Racing

• Destroy All Humans

• Fallout series

• Grand Theft Auto series

• Oddworld series

• Postal series

• Smash TV

• Total Carnage

• Twisted Metal series

• The Bard's Tale

Websites

• The Best Page in the Universe

• Contemplating Reiko

• Darwin Awards

• Happy Tree Friends

• Perry Bible Fellowship

• Something Awful

• Fat-Pie

• 4chan (especially the /b/ section of the site)

• Weebl and Bob

• Illwillpress

• Genmay

• Chopping Block Webcomic

People

Authors

• Kathy Acker

• Steve Aylett

• Max Barry

• Ambrose Bierce

• Charles Bukowski

• Céline

• Paddy Cheyefsky

• Pierre Desproges

• Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• Bret Easton Ellis

• James Gunn

• Joseph Heller

• Franz Kafka

• Joe Orton

• George Orwell

• C.D. Payne

• Chuck Palahniuk

• Thomas Pynchon

• Terry Southern

• John Swartzwelder

• Hunter S. Thompson

• Jim Thompson

• Kurt Vonnegut

• John Webster

• Irvine Welsh

Comedians

• Alan Alda

• Lewis Black

• Brother Theodore

• Lenny Bruce

• George Carlin

• Louis C.K.

• David Cross

• Larry David

• Zach Galifianakis

• Bill Hicks

• Andy Kaufman

• Sam Kinison

• Denis Leary

• Richard Lewis

• Steve Marmel

• Dennis Miller

• Shazia Mirza

• Jim Norton

• Michael O'Donoghue

• Patton Oswalt

• Penn & Teller

• Richard Pryor

• Robert Schimmel

• Robert Smigel

• Sarah Silverman

• Jon Stewart

• Christopher Titus

• Andrew Lawrence (stand-up comedian)

Comics Artists and Writers

• Charles Addams

• Gary Baseman

• Ivan Brunetti

• Daniel Clowes

• Robert Crumb

• Paul Dini

• Roman Dirge

• Warren Ellis

• Garth Ennis

• André Franquin (with the "Idées Noires" series)

• Edward Gorey

• Junji Ito

• Kaz

• Gary Larson

• Mike Mignola

• R.K. Milholland

• Tony Millionaire

• Eric Millikin

• Alan Moore

• Stephan Pastis

• Ted Rall

• David Rees

• John Linton Roberson

• Johnny Ryan

• Yoshio Sawai

• Tom Tomorrow

• Ralph Steadman

• Frank Miller

• Jhonen Vasquez

• Chris Ware

• Gahan Wilson

Filmmakers

• Park Chan-Wook

• Wes Anderson

• Stanley Kubrick

• Alexander Payne

• David Lynch

• Joel and Ethan Coen

• James Gunn

• John Waters

• Luis Buñuel

• Trey Parker

• Peter Jackson

• Sam Raimi

• Terry Zwigoff

• Tim Burton

• Quentin Tarantino

• Terry Gilliam

• Edgar Wright

Musicians

• Alice Cooper

• Anal Cunt

• Barenaked Ladies

• The Beatles/John Lennon

• Black Flag

• The Bloodhound Gang

• Bob Dylan

• Boys Night Out

• Brian Eno

• Cannibal Corpse

• The Crocketts

• The Cure

• Cypress Hill

• Dead Kennedys

• D12

• Depeche Mode

• Devo

• Elvis Costello

• Eminem

• Faith No More

• Frank Zappa

• GWAR

• Iggy Pop

• Insane Clown Posse

• John Cage

• John Zorn

• Johnny Cash

• Leonard Cohen

• Gustav Mahler

• Marilyn Manson

• Mike Patton

• Mindless Self Indulgence

• Mortician

• Motörhead

• Mr. Bungle

• Nick Cave

• Nirvana

• Ozzy Osbourne

• Phil Ochs

• Pink Floyd

• Primus

• Propagandhi

• Pungent Stench

• Ramones

• Radiohead

• The Residents

• Revolting Cocks

• Rob Zombie

• S.O.D.

• Strapping Young Lad

• The Sex Pistols

• The Smiths/Morrissey

• Space

• They Might Be Giants

• Tom Lehrer

• Tom Waits

• Twiztid

• Type O Negative

• "Weird Al" Yankovic

• Warren Zevon

• White Zombie

• XTC

Radio Personalities

• Adam Carolla

• Don Imus

• Howard Stern

• Joe Frank

• Opie and Anthony