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Black comedy
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Black comedy, also known as black humour is a sub-genre of comedy and satire where topics and events that are usually treated seriously—death, mass murder, suicide, domestic abuse, sickness, madness, fear, drug abuse, rape, war, terrorism etc.—are treated in a humorous or satirical manner. Synonyms include dark humour and morbid humour. Although very similar, it is not to be confused with gallows humour and off-colour humour.
Black comedy should be contrasted with obscenity, though the two are interrelated. In obscene humour, much of the humorous element comes from shock and revulsion; black comedy 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. Or by a Scene in the play "Grandma's in the Wedding Cake": The recently deceased Grandmother's ashes continually get accidentally moved around, ending in the Wedding Cake at the Wedding.
Black humour is also parodied. A common gag is the humorous reaction to something that is supposedly serious but clearly is not. One example of this are Kenny's deaths on South Park.
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. A more modern film based upon black comedy is Little Miss Sunshine (although it could also be argued that the movie is also based upon dramatical comedy), or 2003's Bad Santa, starring Billy Bob Thornton.
Notable directors of black comedy films include Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, The Coen Brothers, Martin Scorsese, Ralph Bakshi, Peter Jackson, & Stanley Kubrick.