Black Comedy / Music

• A drinking song popular in some Australian universities ^note  and some Austrian ones in a very entertaining German translation starts with "My name is Jack / And I'm a necrophiliac / I get so hard / When I see a graveyard" and gets significantly worse from there. (No, You Do NOT Want To Know. Seriously.)
• AJJ employ this trope frequently. Their songs deal with issues such as self-loathing, social anxiety, poverty, homelessness, Parental Abandonment, racism, sexism, and lead singer Sean Bonnette's grandfather's terminal cancer, but manage to be extremely funny (and quotable) in the process. It helps that they have titles like "The Michael Jordan of Drunk Driving".
• Like the rest of their music library, the song "I Lit Your Baby on Fire" by the politically incorrect grindcore band Anal Cunt is a thrashing, incomprehensible ode to doing Exactly What It Says on the Tin, complete with wonderfully heartwarming lyrics such as, "It screamed a little louder / And then it shut up".
• The end of the video for "I Could Be the One (Stranger)", by Avicii and Nicky Romero, depicts the protagonist getting hit by a car.
• The Beatles:
  • The original cover art of Yesterday and Today, which depicts the Fab Four covered in broken baby dolls and raw meat, giving the impression that the babies have been butchered.
  • The song "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" achieves this effect largely through Lyrical Dissonance. It's a cheerful little ditty about a man who keep bashing people's heads in with a hammer.
• A lot of Mitch Benn's stuff. "Rock And Roll Hall of Death", for instance, parodies the fascination people have with pop stars' deaths... by imagining a museum devoted to them:
  See the pills that Karen Carpenter took to stay skinny
  Gene Vincent's motorbike and Marc Bolan's Mini
• Big Black addresses issues such as murder, rape, necrophilia, suicide, racism, and the works:
  • Their first LP, Atomizer, includes songs about a parent-child molestation ring, a black man who's light-skinned enough to pass off as a white guy, a corrupt police officer, a guy who's bored with arson and easy sex (the only two things teens in rural America do for fun) and decides to combine them, a man who goes to "houses of ill repute", a wife-beater and/or fist-fucker, a recovering alcoholic who relapses, a veteran with shellshock who becomes a hitman, and two teens who go to a slaughterhouse for entertainment.
  • Their 2nd LP, Songs About Fucking, features asshole truck drivers; a Kraftwerk cover; a guy who has sex with other people's girlfriends; a young girl who slept away 15 years of her life and wanted to kill herself but couldn't; sexual humiliation as a habit; a killing method in which the throat is cut open and the tongue is pulled out through the hole; an eccentric man who parties all night; a fungus that can grow on bread and cause serious hallucinations if ingested; a mafia killing in which a parked car was rigged to explode when the target's car passed by; a guy who had sex with a woman who refused his brother's earlier advances and killed her with his shoe, then hid her body in a pond while hosing down his truck with loud music on; people who slowly turn into what they hate most without trying; and a Cheap Trick cover
  • They also have an EP whose cover art depicts a real-life suicide victim whose head was split in two after shooting himself with a shotgun. The name of this EP? Headache.
• The Bloodhound Gang have songs like "Lift Your Head Up High (and Blow Your Brains Out)" and the classic "A Lap Dance Is So Much Better When the Stripper Is Crying".
• The Blue Kid song "The Dismemberment Song" is an upbeat tune about a woman gloating that she intends to get back at an abusive ex-boyfriend by torturing him and cutting him to pieces.
  This'll be ooh, this'll be ahh, this'll be absolutely whee!
  This'll be nice, this'll be neat and bring you closer to me
  So don't you squirm, don't you fret, I'm not gonna hurt you yet
  I just feel the need to be getting, a little of you a lot of bloodletting
  I know the sensation you're probably dreading, but cutting you up will be so refreshing for me!
• Julie Brown has "The Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun", which is about the singer's friend abruptly starting a school shooting during homecoming. Also trips the line into Comedic Sociopathy, between the singer's reaction ("My best friend's on a shooting spree/Stop it, Debbie, you're embarrassing me!") and her frequent trivialization of the carnage before her.
• Bo Burnham employs this now and again in his songs — some of his most popular songs are about the KKK and pedophilia.
• Harry Chapin's "30,000 Pounds of Bananas" is about a truck driver who loses control of his truck going down a hill and dies in the ensuing crash (Based on a True Story, even). The whole thing's Played for Laughs, between the repeated mention of the bananas (the truck's cargo, and they end up splatted all over the road in the crash) and morbid humor (when the brakes fail: "He said 'Christ!' / It was funny how he had named the only man who could save him now..."). The song also spawned the "Harry, it sucks" meme from the band's reaction to Chapin's first couple of attempts at writing an ending.
• Creature Feature's song "A Gorey Demise" features this, along with general Gallows Humor. It's a song with a basic concept of reciting the year's obituaries, in an ABC format inspired by The Gashlycrumb Tinies.
  "G" is for Greg who died in the womb
• The song "Another Irish Drinking Song" by Da Vinci's Notebook is this. It's basically explaining that the singer drinks constantly because everyone's died. It starts with dad, mom, two brothers, a sister, and goes into uncles, grand-uncles, grandparents, a guy who went to Notre Dame, a Scotsman (whose death is dismissed on the grounds that he wasn't Irish), a pedophile priest, and finally talking about how when the singer dies, they want the Lord to kill the cast of Riverdance. And Michael Flatley too. The chorus is basically repeating "drink", then dance, sing, fight, throw up, pass out, and wake up to drink again.
• Dead Kennedys has many comedy songs about religion, war, murder, corruption. Frankenchrist in particular is full of it.
• Devo songs often contain underlying dark humour, but a select few sound almost like they're not joking. The songs from their early demo period are particularly strong examples.
  • "Mongoloid" might seem controversial for its title alone, although it isn't a particularly offensive song. The lyrics portray the titular "mongoloid" as a well-adjusted and productive member of society ("And he wore a hat / And he had a job / And he brought home the bacon / So that no one knew"), and this actually resulted in Devo getting several supportive letters from parents to children with Downs syndrome.
  • "Triumph of the Will" can be interpreted as being about a rapist or a player who likes to think that he knows that girls want him but are afraid to show their sexual side. On top of this, the song is named after a famous Nazi propaganda film, perhaps suggesting that fascism and rape arise from the same mentality.
    It is the thing females ask for
    When they convey the opposite
  • Gerry Casale's alter ego, Jihad Jerry. Also, in a very early Devo performance, Jerry donned those "Chinese" toy glasses as a character called Chinaman (you can see a brief shot of him in their "Secret Agent Man" video).
  • "I Desire" contains love lyrics written by would-be-assassin John Hinckley Jr. The joke may have been on Warner (Bros.) Records, who had to pay royalties to an inmate.
  • Sometimes Devo were controversial for their music videos. In one case, the Jimi Hendrix estate forbade them from including their video for "Are You Experienced?" on a DVD because there's a shot of a Jimi Hendrix look-a-like coming out of a coffin to play guitar, which they assumed was making fun of him.
  • In "The Rope Song", the singer tied a rope around the waist of a pretty girl he met so he can pull her back whenever she tries to run away.
  • "I Need A Chick" is a crass song about a very sexually frustrated man who wants to have sex right now.
• "Prop Me Up Beside the Jukebox (If I Die)" by Joe Diffie. He asks that, should he die, his body should be stood up beside the jukebox with a "stiff drink" in his hand. The song starts off as a slow fiddle piece before abruptly shifting into upbeat honky-tonk.
• The Dixie Chicks' "Goodbye Earl" is a jaunty number about a woman who enlists a friend's help to kill and dispose of an abusive husband. And it's played entirely for laughs.
• This most certainly applies to the Doug Anthony All Stars, an Australian musical comedy trio whose repertoire includes songs about necrophilia ("Necro-romancer"), bestiality ("I Fuck Dogs"), their desire to murder Oprah Winfrey ("Oprah"), the Twelve Apostles' drug habit ("Catholic Girls on LSD"), their wish to crawl back inside their mothers' wombs ("Mummy Dearest"), and snogging grandma ("World's Best Kisser"). And that's just for starters.
• Dr. Elmo's song "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer", where the narrator tells of how his grandmother was run over by one of Santa's reindeer. The song is rather cheery and comical even with the strong implication that the accident killed Grandma.
• "Benny the Bouncer" by Emerson, Lake & Palmer, which is about a bouncer named Benny who is cut into pieces and brutally killed by Savage Sid. In contrast, the piece is sung by Lake in a ridiculous, heavy accent, while accompanied by Emerson on a honky-tonk piano, giving an impression of being upbeat and silly. Often considered as a filler track.
• Brian Eno's song "Baby's On Fire" is a cheerful uptempo rocker about... well, take a guess.
• The Frogs' infamous It's Only Right And Natural, where every song is written from the point of view of over-the-top sex-obsessed gay men ^note and, on "Dykes are We", gay women, though in that case the joke seems to just be the Larynx Dissonance of the two clearly male singers not bothering to change their voices — possibly the song that really Crosses the Line Twice is "Baby Greaser George", in which the narrator sees a three month old baby dressed as a leather man, puts his "thing" in the child's mouth, and gets his left testicle bitten off. The cover art also courted controversy with a picture of a smiling young boy with a pink triangle pin- though it's a childhood photo of member Dennis Flemion and the pin appears to have been edited into the photo after the fact.
• "Flopsy the Dead Man" by Mary Gillot is a parody of the Christmas song "Frosty the Snowman" where children befriend a decaying corpse.
• Post-Rock group Godspeed You! Black Emperor have a short, jaunty little acoustic guitar interlude entitled "Moya Sings Baby-O" at the beginning of "Antennas to Heaven", which is otherwise a dark, minimalist instrumental. The lyrics talk about abusing, ignoring, gouging the eyes of and feeding alcohol to a baby. It's entirely unexpected. This interlude is a version of the Appalachian folk song "What'll We Do With The Baby-O" — given the Lyrical Dissonance, the song was probably intended as black comedy to begin with.
• Celtic and filk singer Marc Gunn wrote a lullaby for his daughter... about demons underneath her bed that will eat her up if she doesn't go to sleep.
  That is not a blanket...
  Goodnight!
• Guns N' Roses's song "Used To Love Her":
  I used to love her, but I had to kill her
  I had to put her six feet under
  And I can still hear her complain
• Insane Clown Posse has quite a lot of songs making light of very dark subject matter, such as "Toy Box" (which samples the theme song to Pee-wee's Playhouse and is about a kid who gets back at his classmates for picking on him by slaughtering them all with a collection of dangerous toys he brings to show and tell) and many songs about necrophilia (e.g. "Cemetery Girl", "Dead Body Man" and "In My Room").
• "Pray for You" by Jaron and the Long Road to Love. Told by a preacher that he should pray for even those whom he hates, the narrator asks the following on his ex-wife:
  I pray your brakes go out running down a hill
  I pray a flowerpot falls from a windowsill
  And knocks you in the head like I'd like to
• A fair number of the songs by Kunt and the Gang deal with morbid subjects being discussed in a humorous manner.
  • "The Abortion Song" is about the singer (portrayed in the now-deleted music video as Kunt dressed as Ronald McDonald) wanting to give his pregnant girlfriend an abortion against her wishes, some of the methods he considers bordering on Domestic Abuse.
  • "I Was Pissed Out of My Head" concerns the singer attacking and killing people while extremely drunk.
  • Black Comedy Rape is a theme used for his songs "Paperboy" and "Jimmy Savile and the Sexy Kids", the former being about the singer molesting a paperboy because he reminds him of a girl he had a crush on when he was younger while the latter is a fictionalized account of Kunt being haunted by the ghost of Jimmy Savile and being persuaded to write a song defending the posthumously disgraced TV personality by Jimmy rationalizing his sex crimes on the basis of his victims being "sexy kids".
• Johnny Cash:
  • The song "Joe Bean" is about a young man sentenced to death by hanging on his birthday. He's hoping for a pardon from the governor (because even though he's a mass murderer and bank robber, he didn't do the killing he was convicted for) but, instead, the governor sends birthday greetings to him. And the last verse goes:
    Happy Birthday Joe Bean
    Happy Birthday Joe Bean
    Happy Birthday dear Joe
    (sound of a gallows platform dropping and a rope tightening)
    Happy Birthday to you.
  • "25 Minutes to Go" (originally written by Shel Silverstein) features a man counting down the minutes before his execution by hanging with a variety of often comedic observations for each minute.
• Jon Lajoie does this often in a lot of his videos. Probably the most obvious one is MC Extremely Inappropriate Rhymes in "WTF Collective 2":
  I shake things up like [Michael] J. Fox when I get on the mic
  And I drop my enemies like Christopher Reeves' horse
• More than half of Tom Lehrer's songs fits:
  • "I Got It From Agnes" is an unintentional example, since started out as one of his more lighthearted songs (similar to "The Elements" and such) on an enigmatic subject, since, as Lehrer has stated, it was written long before anyone had heard of AIDS. STDs were thought about far less commonly at the time, although the dark interpretation — inescapable today — just happens to conveniently fit among Lehrer's usual themes, so nowadays he's just gone with that interpretation. That said, the song is pretty damn dark even without taking AIDS into account; one character gets an STD from her father, "who gives her everything", and another gives it to his dog.
  • "I Hold Your Hand in Mine" might sound innocent, at least until the twist that the singer has killed his object of affection and is holding her severed hand.
• Stephen Lynch:
  • The best example might be "For The Ladies", where he contemplates the best way to cause a miscarriage in his pregnant wife.
  • "Baby", which is about realising how ugly his newborn daughter is. Contains the line, "I always wanted kids / Is it wrong to hope for SIDS?"
  • There's also "Halloween", which involves the culinary possibilities offered by trick-or-treaters.
• Seanan McGuire's lullaby "You Would Fit In the Microwave".
• The kids' song "Baby Bumblebee", sung to the tune of 19th-century folk song "Arkansas Traveller", that got featured on Wee Sing Silly Songs as well as other silly song compilations. It starts off tame...but gradually gets more and more disgusting as the song goes on.
  ''I'm bringing home my baby bumblebee
  Won't my mommy be so proud of me
  I'm bringing home my baby bumblebee—
  OUCH!! It stung me!!''
  ''I'm squishin' up my baby bumblebee
  Won't my mommy be so proud of me
  I'm squishin' up my baby bumblebee—
  EW!! What a mess!!''
  • In at least one Dublin incarnation, the end result is...licking the bee gunk from your arms, puking it up, and then sweeping it away, "like a good Brownie should".
• The National Lampoon album Rules of the Road has a song called "There's No I in Teamster", an amusing number about some truckers who value loyalty to the degree that they murder any snitches among them.
  There's no I in Teamster, 'cause teamsters are a team
  You're wid us or again' us, there is no in-between
  It's better to be wid us, you can just ask Sammy the Rat
  If you could make his headless body talk
  If you could make his headless body talk!
• A lot of Randy Newman's early songs are full of dark humor. For example, "Sail Away" is a Copland-esque ballad describing America as the promised land that is being used by a slave-trader to entice an African boy onto a ship and into bondage.
• Noah and the Whale's "Jocasta". Unsurprisingly to anyone who knows the story of Jocasta, it involves actual baby death.
  When the baby's born
  Oh, let's turn it to the snow
  So that ice will surely form
  Over weak and brittle bones
  Oh, let's leave it to the wolves
  So their teeth turn it to food
  Oh, its flesh keeps them alive
  Oh, its death helps life survive
  Oh, the world can be kind in its own way
• Virginia O'Brien's "Say That We're Sweethearts Again", (given a notable rendition by Harley Quinn on an episode of Batman: The Animated Series) a song about domestic abuse, is as hilarious as it is brutal. There is even a brief spoken-word portion of the song where the viewpoint character mentions incidents where her abuser set her on fire and attempted to drown her as if such actions are sweet moments between couples to reminisce.
• "Dead Puppies Aren't Much Fun" by Ogden Edsl. The title is self explanatory, so why is it so amusing?
• Amanda Palmer has a thing for upbeat catchy songs with really dark lyrics:
  • "Oasis" is a song about getting raped and then having an abortion, but it's okay, because Oasis wrote her a letter.
  • "Mandy Goes to Med School" is a very groovy sort of cabaret song about back-alley abortions.
  • "Lonesome Organist Rapes Page-Turner", which is a fantastic and really rather amusing song that is about Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
• Ludwig Von 88 is much about doing that, being a satirical group. The most obvious example is that they made several jokes about Ayrton Senna's death.
• Rammstein has some of this going on in some songs — not necessarily in an obvious way, but still in quite a few:
  • "Mein Teil" is a great example of Rammstein's dark comedy. The song depicts the Meiwes cannibalism case... from the perspective of the willing victim.
  • "Ich tu' dir weh", which very explicitly describes some extreme sadomasochistic actions, but is sung in quite a catchy rhythm.
  • "Liebe ist für alle da", which goes on about how "love is for everyone", while clearly being about a rapist.
  • This also extends to their shows, where, as an allusion to a real case of (arguably voluntary) fetish humanitarianism, a short "play" was shown in which one of the band's members was chased around the stage with a flamethrower and then "cooked" in a giant pot.
• "The Chimney Song" by Bob Rivers consists of a little girl cheerfully singing about her confusion at Santa Claus not showing up at her house as well as a mysterious chimney blockage.
• Schaffer the Darklord's "Attack of the Clonefucker" tells of a post-apocalyptic future where robots are at war with mankind, and humans send clones of themselves as soldiers to fight in their place. One cloner decides to take advantage of the situation by cloning himself so he can use the clones as sex slaves and is eventually forced to kill his clones.
• The song "ND Waza Bat" by Keith Secola is an upbeat song about Andy Griffith being a vampire bat and draining the blood of Helen Crump, Barney Fife, and Otis the Drunk.
• Australian band The Self-Righteous Brothers have a whole string of songs which fit this trope, often sung in a pleasantly melodious fashion.
  • From "Now You're Gone":
    Now your family want to take me to court
    Just for having sex with your rotting corpse
    I love you so much more
    Now that you're gone
  • They are also responsible for such gems as "Daddy Drinks Because You Cry" and "(Too Much) Sperm In Your Eyes".
• "You're Always Welcome at Our House" by Shel Silverstein has the singer describe several people their family has killed and hidden away after letting them in their home, the murderous nature of the singer's family belied by their assurance in each refrain that they'll always welcome visitors.
  So when you come to our house, our house, our house
  When you come to our house, we'll have some fun
  We'll ask you to come in
  And we'll take you in the kitchen
  And we'll put you in the oven until you're done
• The song "Girlfriend in a Coma" by The Smiths, in which it's implied that the reason said girlfriend is in a coma is because the narrator tried to murder her, and he's now trying to finish the job while claiming that he would hate for anything to happen to her.
• A good chunk of Velvet Underground's second album, 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.
• Ween:
  • "Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down)", complete with a squeakily sung impression of a terminally ill child, would seem to be in the worst possible taste, but the chorus, sung in an adult voice ("Shine on mighty Jesus, spinal meningitis got me down"), indicates a touch of religious satire. Maybe...
  • More prominent in the side project Moistboyz, in which singer Guy Heller, in character as Dickie Moist, sings about over-the-top acts of violence, advocates harmful activities such as drinking and driving, and so on. For example, "Supersoaker MD50", in which a group of suburban teens in a truck do a prank drive-by in which they spray Dickie with a water gun. Rather than moving on since it's just a few kids having harmless fun, he decides to enact his revenge on them. And what kind of punishment does spraying someone with a water gun call for? He smashes their windshield with them still inside, which both sends glass flying in their faces and causes them to wreck and presumably die.
• Quite a few of "Weird Al" Yankovic's songs qualify:
  • "Mr. Frump in the Iron Lung" is an upbeat song about the narrator visiting a man in an iron lung and having one-sided conversations with him until he dies.
  • "Christmas at Ground Zero" is about people celebrating Christmas during the start of a nuclear war.
  • "Good Old Days" is a lighthearted-sounding song where the singer warmly reminisces about his past, mentioning normal things to feel nostalgic about before revealing red flags that he is some kind of sadistic psychopath. In the first verse, he talks about how his dad would water the lawn or go fishing, his mother would bake biscuits or apple pie in the kitchen, and he'd spend his days torturing rats and flies in the basement. The second verse has him speaking fondly of a kindly neighbor named Mr. Fender before giddily recalling burning down his house and killing him. The third and final verse recounts how he shaved his high school crush's head and left her to die in the desert after taking her to the homecoming dance.
  • "Trigger Happy" is sung from the perspective of a gun-crazed psycho who apparently believes that shooting people is the best way to solve problems and mentions that he accidentally shot his father and his cat on two separate occasions.
  • "You Don't Love Me Anymore" is a ballad about all the ways the singer's girlfriend has tried to kill him.
  • "I Remember Larry" recounts how the singer was bullied (sometimes quite viciously and dangerously) and how he killed the bully.
  • "The Night Santa Went Crazy" details Santa Claus going on a killing spree at the North Pole.
  • "Party at the Leper Colony" is this crossed with Hurricane of Puns.
    Met a little lady so pretty and young
    She was quite the talker till the cat got her tongue
    She oozed up beside me, I turned on my charm
    Pretty soon she was completely disarmed
    
    I said, "Girl, don't you fall to pieces on me"
    But she cried her eyes out — literally
    At the party at the leper colony
  • "Party in the CIA" is about a CIA agent who loves his job — assassinations, coups d'etat, kidnappings and torture included.
• Frank Zappa also falls into this trope:
  • "Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?" from Joe's Garage is probably the funniest song ever written about getting a venereal disease.
  • "Suicide Chump" from You Are What You Is is easily the funniest song about committing suicide.
  • "Jesus Thinks You're a Jerk" from Broadway the Hard Way has some of this in addressing the hypocrisy of religious fundamentalists claiming to oppose abortion because they respect the sanctity of life, but at the same time being okay with using violence on the people they discriminate against.
    With a Ku Klux muumuu in the back of the truck
    If you ain't born again, they wanna mess you up
    Screaming "No abortion! No sirree
    Life is precious! Can't you see?"
    What's that hangin' from the neighbor's tree?
    Why, it looks like colored folks to me
• Warren Zevon reveled in this:
  • "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me", which begins "I lay my head on the railroad tracks and wait for the Double E; the railroad don't run no more, poor poor pitiful me".
  • "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" is about a Norwegian mercenary in Africa who's assassinated by the CIA, rises from the grave, and takes revenge.
  • "Excitable Boy" is about an insane young man who bites people, then rapes and murders his prom date, then "dug up her grave and built a cage with her bones".
  • "Werewolves of London", which talks about werewolves going around London mauling people as if the narrator was simply sharing idle gossip.
    Better stay away from him
    He'll rip your lungs out, Jim
    I'd like to meet his tailor
  • "Mr. Bad Example" is basically a gloating Villain Song, wherein the titular subject, an utterly shameless Card-Carrying Villain, gleefully revels in all the numerous crimes and other misdeeds he has committed throughout his life, and how he has always managed to get away scot-free with it all.

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