No matter what you’re writing, you have to put some sort of thought and effort into it. This definitely applies to comedy, including dark comedy. It’s a lot harder and a lot more complicated than it looks to create something that’s both dark and funny, and so if you’re going to do it, you really should try your hardest to make sure that it’s of the very best quality you can possibly manage. Who’s going to laugh at a joke that’s poorly constructed and badly delivered, after all?
The problem is that a lot of people don’t really understand the concept of darkness that well. Often, they either have a very superficial understanding of it, or they don’t know how or why the darkness should be used. Non-comedy examples of this can be found in a lot of graphic novels. After comics like Sandman, The Crow and Watchmen became popular, comics creators realised that they didn’t have to just write PG-rated adventures for kids, and could instead write more mature stories aimed at an older audience. Unfortunately, while there are plenty of good dark comics out there that focus on character development and mature themes, there are many others that think being mature means shoving in loads of sex, gore and material that’s inappropriate for pretty much anybody. True, the latter is dark too, but in a very shallow way, ignoring the fact that there’s many shades to the rainbow of darkness.
The same thing often happens when it comes to dark humour. A lot of people have this idea that black comedy always equals crude and offensive comedy, but this isn’t the case. In fact, crude humour is actually known as blue comedy, not black. While black comedy can often be offensive to some people, that should never actually be its main focus, since humour is meant to be, well, humorous. Something that’s merely meant to produce a shock reaction is just a poor substitute for that.
I’d like to take a look at a few of my favourite practitioners of dark comedy, starting with Edward Gorey, a brilliant cartoonist who had a big influence on such artists as Lemony Snicket and Tim Burton. Many of his works were very dark and very funny because of that darkness, though there were many other levels to his humour as well. His most famous work, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, is an alphabet book about children who all die horribly. This book is funny for many reasons. Firstly, it’s a subversion of the sort of bright and sunny picture books children are often given to read, and in a nice touch, you could actually use it to teach somebody the alphabet if you really wanted to. (Of course, I wouldn’t advise you actually trying that out.) Not only that, there’s a sense of absurdity to it. The whole thing is so funny because of how ridiculous it is. And there isn’t any nastiness to it, either; Gorey’s wonderfully atmospheric illustrations gives you a sense of sympathy for the dead children. If the book had simply been like “Some kids died, look at all their guts”, then it wouldn’t have been funny at all. The Bunny Suicides books make use of a similar (though slightly edgier) idea, combining cute rabbits with death and misery to create a concept that’s so absurd it’s funny.
Of course, black comedy can be gentle too. It can even be touching, or bittersweet. Harold and Maude is often described as a black comedy, yet it’s also a heartwarming love story that always makes me cry. The beloved comic strip Peanuts is also pretty dark, though there isn’t any death or violence in it. The darkness comes from the characters’ deep insecurities, and the humour in it works because the characters are well-developed and sympathetic ones who we feel sympathy for. As well as this, Peanuts has plenty of sweet moments in it too, to balance out the dark bits. Sometimes, dark humour isn’t about laughing at a fictional character’s misfortune, but gently poking fun at it instead. And sometimes darkness can just be an element of the humour, rather than just dominating it completely. That way, the writer is simply acknowledging that darkness exists in the characters’ lives, which is a pretty mature thing to do.
Dark humour does have its limits, I think. There aren’t any definite boundaries, though most people can tell when those have been crossed. There are some things, for instance, that are just too horrible to joke about in any way, and there are some subjects that have to be handled very delicately in order for them to work. Black humour should be dark, challenging and even unsettling, but not nasty or upsetting. And if you’re going to make a joke about a real-life tragedy, that’s just disgusting and mean-spirited.
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