Dark Comedy
Also known as black comedy · dark humor
Comedy about subjects usually treated as painful or taboo, such as death, crime, illness and war. The laugh comes from how people behave around the terrible thing, played with a straight face.
- Drama
- She can't choose a casket. She can't choose anything.
- Dark comedy
- She asks if they rent caskets. He'd want to save the money.
In practice
Dark comedy, also called black comedy or dark humor, makes an audience laugh at subjects that are usually off limits: death, illness, war, crime, grief and cruelty. The joke is not that these things are funny. It is that people facing them behave in ways that are, and the laugh lets an audience look at something it would otherwise turn away from.
The surrealist André Breton gave the form a name in 1940 with his Anthology of Black Humor, which collected writers from Jonathan Swift to Franz Kafka. Swift's A Modest Proposal (1729), which calmly suggests that the poor sell their children as food, is still the textbook example: a monstrous idea delivered in the flat, reasonable voice of a policy paper.
On screen it runs from Dr. Strangelove (1964), where nuclear war is a bureaucratic farce, to Fargo (1996), In Bruges (2008) and Parasite (2019), and on television from M*A*S*H to Barry and Fleabag. A common technique is to play the situation straight: characters treat the absurd and the terrible as ordinary business, and the comedy comes from the gap.
Grief played completely straight
INT. FUNERAL HOME - OFFICE - DAY
DORIS (70s) and her son GLEN (40s) sit across from a DIRECTOR, who slides a price list across the desk.
DIRECTOR
The oak casket is our most popular choice.
DORIS
He'd hate oak. He'd hate paying for oak.
GLEN
Could we rent one? Just for the service?
The Director does not blink. He turns the page to RENTALS.
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Nobody in the scene makes a joke. Doris honors her husband by being as cheap as he was, Glen asks a reasonable question at the worst possible moment, and the Director's calm says this happens every week. Dark comedy on the page is mostly a matter of characters taking a terrible situation seriously in the wrong way.
What dark humor is, and what it is not
Dark humor finds the comedy inside pain rather than in spite of it. A dark comedy is still about the death or the crime; it does not cut away to a funny subplot. The laugh comes from the characters' denial, pettiness, panic or ordinary habits running into something enormous, such as a hitman who worries about tourist sights in In Bruges or a widow haggling over a casket.
It is not the same as shock humor, which aims to offend, or gallows humor alone, the jokes people tell to get through danger. Gallows humor is one of its tools, as in the wartime surgeons of M*A*S*H. Satire is a close cousin: satire uses ridicule to attack a target, while dark comedy may have no target at all beyond the human habit of carrying on.
Black comedy and dark comedy mean the same thing. Black comes from Breton's French term for black humor, and black comedy is the older term in British criticism. Dark humor usually names the joke or the sensibility, dark comedy the genre.
Dark comedy examples in film and TV
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) plays the end of the world as a meeting that goes badly. Its most famous line, "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room," works because the president means it.
Fargo (1996) and the Coen brothers' later films set kind, chatty people against violent fools. Heathers (1989) turns high school murder into a teen comedy, and Death Becomes Her (1992) makes vanity literally undying. In Bruges (2008) is a hitman film about guilt that is also, scene by scene, very funny.
On television, Barry follows a hitman taking acting classes, Fleabag laughs through grief and guilt, and Succession makes a family's cruelty a running comedy of manners. Parasite (2019) shows how far the form can travel: it is a dark comedy about class until, in one sequence, it stops being funny at all.
How to write dark comedy
Play it straight. Characters in a dark comedy believe their situation and pursue what they want with total seriousness. The moment a character comments on how absurd things are, the audience is let off the hook and the tension that makes the laugh is gone.
Ground the stakes. The audience has to feel the death, the debt or the crime as real, or the comedy turns into a cartoon. Let one character feel the weight while others do not, and the contrast does the work: Marge in Fargo is decent and warm in a story full of greed and wood chippers.
Aim the joke at people, not at the suffering. A scene where the victim's pain is the punchline usually reads as cruel. A scene where the living fail to cope with it, by haggling, lying, overplanning or saying the wrong thing, reads as human. Specific, mundane detail is the engine: the rental casket, the parking ticket at the crime scene.
Dark comedy vs. satire, farce and tragedy
Satire uses humor to criticize, and it always has a target, such as a government, an industry or a class. Dr. Strangelove is both a dark comedy and a satire of nuclear strategy. Farce runs on speed, coincidence and doors slamming; a dark farce such as Death at a Funeral (2007) adds a corpse to the chaos.
Tragedy and dark comedy can share a plot. The difference is the angle: tragedy asks us to feel the fall, dark comedy asks us to see how ridiculous people are while it happens. Many of the best examples, from Fargo to Parasite, turn from one to the other in a single scene.
Common questions
What is dark humor?
Dark humor is comedy about subjects normally treated as serious or painful, such as death, illness, crime or war. It finds the laugh in how people behave around those subjects, not in the suffering itself.
Is dark comedy the same as black comedy?
Yes. Black comedy is the older name, from André Breton's French term for black humor. Dark comedy and dark humor mean the same thing; dark humor usually describes the jokes, dark comedy the genre.
What are examples of dark comedy movies?
Dr. Strangelove, Heathers, Fargo, Death Becomes Her, In Bruges, The Death of Stalin and Parasite. On TV, M*A*S*H, Barry, Fleabag and Succession.
What is the difference between dark comedy and satire?
Satire always attacks a target, such as a politician, an institution or a custom. Dark comedy laughs at grim subjects and may have no target beyond human nature. A film can be both.
Why do people like dark humor?
It lets people face fear, grief and absurdity at a safe distance. Laughing at how characters fail to cope with death or disaster is a way of acknowledging those things instead of looking away.
How do you write dark comedy?
Play the situation straight, keep the stakes real, and find the humor in characters' denial, pettiness and ordinary habits colliding with something terrible. Avoid making the victim's pain the punchline.
Is gallows humor the same as dark humor?
Gallows humor is one kind of dark humor: the jokes people make about their own danger, like soldiers or surgeons joking under fire. Dark humor is the wider term for any comedy about grim subjects.