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And we're just getting started.
Do you know what's funnier than a dead baby? A dead baby in a clown suit.
Dr. Young: "That's horrible. How can you joke about something like that?"
Riddler: "Easily, doctor... it's not my baby."
A series which largely depends on its controversy. Whether or not all the jokes are funny, they're designed to be as potentially offensive as possible. There is no such thing as Too Soon.
Although this can produce some edgy comedy and become popular enough to get around the censors, it creates a self-defeating situation. Once society has caught up with the edginess (sometimes due to the show's own popularity) the show must either keep upping the ante or retool itself lest it be considered wearing itself out. Doubly problematic is the fact that the people who would be most offended by it (i.e. Moral Guardians) don't watch it, and those who do watch aren't offended by it.
A common pitfall is that some creators confuse simply being offensive with being both offensive and funny. The creators may throw anything onto the screen they hope will offend the Moral Guardians whether it has any humor to it or not. They might do this to get publicity or they might do it because they honestly think offensiveness is by and of itself funny. Fans who become emotionally invested in the show might not be able to accept that others simply don't think it's very good, and might assume that anyone who complains has to be a stuffy, pinch-mouthed Moral Guardian.
This is typically seen as the realm of the Fox network for basic broadcast TV.
The Dead Baby Comedy could be considered a version of the Gross Out Show, except it can't be marketed to children. (However, it often appears as a Subverted Kids Show.)
Sensitive members of the audience may look at a show like this and say Dude Not Funny. However, the creators may take it as a good sign that their show is offending people, especially Moral Guardians.
The Dead Baby Comedy probably has its roots in the infamous The Aristocrats, but may be (quite literally) related to Jonathan Swift's satirical essay A Modest Proposal, making it Older Than Steam.
Refuge In Vulgarity is often the reason some of these work, and others don't. Toilet Humour may also be present.
Surprisingly different from Black Comedy, which is funny in a wry, serious way, and juxtaposes humor with tragedy rather than disgust. See also Sliding Scale Of Comedy And Horror.
Examples
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Anime
- Oruchuban Ebichu was outright designed to push the envelope as to what could be aired in the Japanese late night slot. As said in its entry, Ebichu has a long tendency of interrupting the protagonists in flagrante delicto...
- The Rapeman.
- Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei is about a teacher who attempts to commit suicide, and has offered to take one of his students with him when he does as a "travelling companion".
- Better yet: one student misconstrues his little speech on lover's double suicide as a declaration of love. She's also a stalker taken Up To Eleven.
- Shin Chan the FU Nimation dub hints at this almost literally in the episode "Brotherhood of the Grovelling Allowance":
(After listening to depressing music)Shin: Will you buy me a shotgun, dad?
Hiro: Sorry, I'm broke.
- In another episode, Mitzi warns a misbehaving Hina, "You're lucky we're not in China, or you'd be in a dumpster right now!"
Comics
- Belgian comic Violine definitely qualifies. Ten-year-old Violine has the ability to read people's minds by looking into their eyes. Her adventures include rescuing mice from being dissected (she even sees one cut open, and vomits), being thought of as a witch and chased by people who want her dead, hopping into a car with a pedophile (and seeing an image of herself bound and gagged and looking terrified when reading his mind), being thrown off a ship that she got caught stowing away on by a crew that assumes she's dead, witnessing the dead bodies of many birds caught in an oil spill, being chased by men with guns who then get eaten by alligators, and many more. All of this is played for very dark humor. Or you could possibly interpret it as a serious story that just has dark jokes scattered throughout, but either way, the sources of humor are pretty damn morbid.
- The main point of Jhonen Vasquez's Johnny The Homicidal Maniac, particularly the early comics, is to show horribly brutal deaths and tortures. As things progress and Johnny gets more and more talky the violence begins to tone down, but that over the top violence remains at the core of most of the comedy in the strip.
- Squee!, by the same author, follows a Johnny's child neighbor through a series of considerably disturbing adventures, such as his grandpa trying to eat him and a rather strange trip to a public bathroom.
- Fillerbunny is all about seeing something cute in inordinate amounts of pain.
- And then there's the Bad Art Collection... and Jelly Fist...
- Oddly, I Feel Sick, despite being another spin off of Johnny, tones this down considerably, favoring a stranger brand of humor. "Cat had acid for blood..."
- Evan Dorkin's "Milk and Cheese" series were literally just about two hyperviolent dairy products who spend every strip they were ever in beat the ever loving shit out of everything they hate. And they hate everything except for liquor, TV, and each other. It's actually hard to describe the level of brutality involved. To put it in context, at one point, a guy from the Guiness Book of World Records shows as they're beating a hippy pot dealer to a bloody mess and crowns them as "World Class Abuse Kings".
- Icelandic playwright/cartoonist Hugleikur Dagsson's crudely-drawn cartoons include such savory topics as incest, coprophagia, bestiality, suicide, and adults intentionally putting children in harms way. Check it out if you dare
 .
- Twisted Toyfare Theater
- Every comic written by Garth Ennis, particularly if not written in the DC universe.
Film
- The Tom Green-directed film Freddy Got Fingered, which actually features the star/writer/director chomping on a baby's umbilical cord, among other weird and gross things. Roger Ebert famously said of this movie:
- Arguably everything else Tom Green has ever done fits this category as well.
- The intro segment to the movie Postal (based on the game of the same name, which is a bad sign, and directed by Uwe Boll, which is a worse one) goes like this, to quote The Other Wiki:
September 11, 2001. Terrorists are about to fly a plane into the World Trade Center when they realize that there can't possibly be enough virgins left in the afterlife, given the recent rash of suicide bombings. After a quick phone call to their leader confirms that they may only get twenty, they decide to call off the attack and fly to The Bahamas. Just then, the cockpit door is kicked open and the passengers struggle to take control of the plane. Veering out of control, it smashes into the Twin Towers - the fiery explosion revealing the film's title card.
- According to the few reviewers who managed to see the movie, this is the least offensive part.
- Sadly, it's also probably the funniest. The rest of the movie is feeble action sequences and stale jokes. The only possible exception are a few choice one liners. In a job interview Q&A: "What is the difference between a duck . . ."
- Meet The Feebles has the puppet form of Dead Baby Comedy.
- Fritz The Cat, period.
- Team America World Police from the creators of South Park.
- The Luis Buñuel 1930 classic "L' Âge d'or", The Golden Age has got lots of these jokes (and it's the most hilarious film ever), one of the main character's is a man working for a good will mission organisation, and is on a mission to spread happiness in the world. He randomly attack people, he kicks a blind man and Kick the Dog more than once. One scene also includes a man that shoot an annoying kid with a rifle.
- Norm Macdonald's film Dirty Work, especially the last line when our hero explains that everything worked out and he got the girl "...and Dr. Farthing got the money to his bookies. But the bookies killed him anyway. So he's dead. Well, that's the end."
Literature
- Happens literally in World War Z when two soldiers pick up human infant skulls and put on a small show for their troop. Would be going into Dude Not Funny territory if the real subject wasn't about the Gallows Humor used for coping with... you know... a Zombie Apocalypse.
- Clive Barker's Mister B. Gone: Filled with the darkest of humor, as can be expected from Clive Barker. There's a scene where The demon villain protagonist bathes in a tub full of dead babies. The townspeople are hot on his trail, since there was a hole in his baby bag, and he left a trail of children, like bread crumbs, on his way back to his hovel. He complains how difficult it was to keep them alive so the bath would be warm when he emptied their blood into the tub.
- “Mrs. Hall, of Sherborne, was brought to bed yesterday of a dead baby, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.” Jane Austen, letter to Cassandra, October 27, 1798.
Live Action TV
- Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia fills its episodes with taboo comedy, riffing on such topics as dumpster babies, statutory rape, crack addiction, and cannibalism.
- In Britain, Chris Morris's show Jam depended almost entirely on this, even featuring a literal dead baby. Another of his shows, Brass Eye, infamously went too far with its "Paedophilia special" and received numerous complaints. Many of these, strangely enough, happened to be from the kind of people and newspapers who the show was satirising in the first place - the News of the World and the Daily Mail acted far more bent out of shape than the Times and the Guardian. Getting celebrities to discuss the implications of a "roboplegic wrongcock" (a paralysed paedophile with cybernetic implants that let him chase children) on television is inherently funny, though.
- The Adam and Joe Show featured a Jam parody with a send-up of the dead baby sketch. Adam played a TV repairman who finds a dead baby behind the set and says he will have to rape the corpse in order to repair the television. A horrified Joe refuses to film any more, and storms off the set while Adam complains that "you don't understand my genius"
- To its credit, the paedophilia special did result in one of the best examples of press hypocrisy I've seen◊. Just remember, the girl on the left was 15 years old when the article was printed.
- Rik Mayall's numerous series for the BBC - The Young Ones, The New Statesman, Bottom - have all included several examples of Dead Baby humor.
- Anything involving Doug in Scrubs. Most of his humor comes from his pure ineptitude at being a doctor so he ends up killing most of his patients. In season four he is finally "promoted" to being a mortician, the logic being that he can't kill a patient that's already dead.
- Not so! Doug became a pathologist. Elliot discovered that he had a knack for identifying causes of death, the implication being that he'd caused them before ("Upstairs, we call that a 'Doug.'") What began as a running dead baby joke — incompetent doctor kills patients — was subverted when said doctor discovered his gift for determining what killed other doctors' patients.
- There's still a lot of (reasonably literal) Dead Baby Comedy using Doug, however. He's constantly losing corpses (in body bags, though - to date - they have never been non-adult-sized body bags) throughout the hospital, and having to recover them, usually by hoisting them over his shoulder or dragging them through the halls. In one case, he actually says
Doug: They're like children. Big, dead children.
- Recently during one of the Brain Trust Meetings:
I propose we get "Hello Kitty" toe tags. You know, for the dead children.
- Little Britain was criticized for its increasing attempts to shock, with characters such as an incontinent old lady and an adult man who breastfeeds from his mother.
- The new "shocking" segments were also utterly devoid of the subtle social satire that made the show a hit in the first place. Oh, and they weren't funny.
- Not to mention "Puking Pure-blood Lady" who projectile vomits whenever she is told that someone of a different ethnic origin prepared the food she is being served.
- The Sarah Silverman Program.
- Kids In The Hall
- TV Funhouse was a very loose Spin Off of the animated segments of the same name from Saturday Night Live, taking the form of a Subverted Kids Show. Choice bits include the ghoulishly lifelike "Ani-Pals" puppets draining the host's spinal fluid in search of "Christmas cheer", a restaurant where various animals eat the meat of their species, and the self-explanatory "Fetal Scooby Doo".
- Wonder Showzen.
- Often used on Mock The Week, especially by Frankie Boyle. On the subject of pets:
"I don't know how long I could be a vet before I got bored and started shagging stuff. I'd shag an owl, because whatever position you took it from you could always get eye contact. Or shag a kitten—could you imagine having sex with something you wanted to cuddle afterwards?"
- Frankie Boyle uses this so much, one could argue he subverted it once. The subject was children, and after one comment about how sinister the picture looked, he went on to tell a really sweet story about his own daughter.
- Similarly, when he skewered the host for a relatively tame joke, everyone remarked on how it must have been odd for him to find himself in the moral high ground. He double subverted it when, a moment later, he made a joke about the Russian that Vladimir Putin had allegedly assassinated through polonium poisoning.
- That pet quote actually merited him his own separate warning before the program started.
- He even lampshades it in a deleted scene (that later appeared in a compilation episode), in which he makes a joke about the recent memorial concert for Princess Diana; after joking that they could have staged a more fitting tribute "by staging a gang-bang in a minefield", he smiles charmingly at the audience's torn-between-shock-and-amusement reaction, goes back to the start position, and innocently notes that "it'll be interesting to see if that makes it in, actually."
- Australian comedy team The Chaser had their show The Chasers War On Everything suspended for two weeks because of a skit parodying the charity Make a Wish Foundation, showing terminally ill children in a hospital and suggesting that they be given pencil cases instead of trips to Disneyland because "they're only going to die anyway." There was an overwhelming reaction of Dude Not Funny to the sketch, including from Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd; and it was cut from both the internet download and any future reruns on TV.
- Some commentators pointed out that another comedy show, The Mansion had used exactly the same joke a year before and received no complaints, to which others responded that at least that one hadn't shown dying children (real or otherwise) in their version of the sketch, which showed a receptionist denying the kids' last requests by phone.
- The Australian newspaper The Daily Telegraph also made note of a story on The Onion's News Network about a child exploiting the loophole of wishing for unlimited wishes and consequently bankrupting the Make A Wish Foundation with his ludicrously long list of demands. Interestingly, the story not only features the child in question but also not-so-subtly casts him as the villain due to his insatiable demands (to the extent of him wishing away the pro-bono legal team the Foundation was hoping to use in its defense) and even features the hosts hoping for his imminent demise so that the Foundation can stop granting his wishes. Presumably Prime Minister Rudd was not told about this sketch either so that he could also comment on it sight unseen.
- The Chaser also did a similar story in The Chaser, their early newspaper. In it, a child's wish was to receive a blow job from Cameron Diaz.
- The previous series of the show had featured The Eulogy Song, which mentioned a number of dead celebrities (including the then recently deceased Steve Irwin) and stated that no matter how awful someone is while they're alive, (s)he will be lauded as a "top bloke" after death. It received a huge number of complaints and The Chaser responded that it was a tamer version of an even more offensive song featured in Chris Taylor's stage show Dead Caesar. The following week they made fun of the controversy in a parody of the "turning off the TV" national election campaign ads then running, with Chas stepping in to switch off the broadcast when The Eulogy Song came on.
- The infamous "Undertaker's Sketch" from episode 26 of Monty Pythons Flying Circus suggested cannibalism as an alternative to interment or cremation. The punchline was so disgusting that Executive Meddling demanded that the studio audience end the episode by storming the set in protest.
- Have I Got News For You, while generally hovering somewhere above this level of offensiveness, did feature this joke about the Louise Woodward case:
"Louise, currently between school and university, will have to remain in America for the duration of the appeal, although she's desperate to come home, as she has to finish an essay entitled 'What I Did in My Year Off.'"
Music
- Brian Eno's song "Baby's On Fire" is a cheerful uptempo rocker about... well, take a guess.
- Arguably it's about the consequences of being a celebrity in general or a model in particular. But on the other hand, Eno did have this habit of choosing lyrics for their phonetic value rather than meaning. So who knows?
- Ween's 'Spinal Meningitis' complete with a squeakily sung impression of a terminally ill child would seem to be in the worst possible taste, although the chorus, sung in an adult voice; "Shine on mighty Jesus, spinal meningitis got me down" indicates a touch of religious satire. Maybe...
- Schaffer the Dark Lord's "Clone-(expletive deleted)," 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... It would be an understatement to say that it doesn't end well.
- Stephen Lynch's "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?"
- also, Stephen Lynch's entire career.
- The best example might be "For The Ladies", where he contemplates the best way to cause a miscarriage in his pregnant wife.
- Devo songs often contain underlying dark humour, but a select few sound almost like they're not joking.
- Particularly songs from their early demo period: "I Need A Chick", "Baby Talkin' Bitches", "Bamboo Bimbo", "I've Been Refused", and "The Rope Song" may offend some.
- "Mongoloid" and "Jocko Homo" might seem controversial for their titles alone, although they aren't particularly offensive songs themselves.
- Contrary to some misinterpretations, "Jocko Homo" has nothing to do with homosexuality.
- "Triumph Of The Will": 'It is the thing females ask for/When they convey the opposite' (The whole song can be interpreted as being about a rapist or a player who knows girls want him but are afraid to show their sexual side).
- "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 - i.e. a talk show host refused to feature them after seeing the video for "Whip It" which she thought was offensive to women. In one case, the Hendrix estate forbid 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.
- 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).
- Australian band 'The Self-Righteous Brothers' have a whole string of songs which fit this trope, often sung in a pleasantly melodious fashion. A couple of examples — 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'.
- Seanan McGuire's lullaby "You Would Fit In the Microwave" is another literal example.
- Eminem's entire celebrity/artistic persona?
- Mainly the songs where his "Slim Shady" alter-ego takes over.
- 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 - possibly the song that really Crosses The Line Twice is "Baby Greaser George", in which the narrator puts his "thing" in the mouth of a 3-month old in a stroller dressed as a leather man, and gets a testicle bitten off. Dead baby comedy isn't all they do, but it's what they're most well-known for due to song titles like "Grandma Sitting In The Corner With A Penis In Her Hand Going 'No No No'".
- The original cover art of The Beatles' Yesterday and Today album, of course.
- And then there's The Bloodhound Gang 's song "Lift Your Head Up High (and Blow Your Brains Out)"
- The title of Tom Lehrer's "I Hold Your Hand in Mine" might sound innocent but hearing it makes you realise it's a representative of this trope.
New Media
- Although many stories from The Onion don't involve Dead Baby Comedy, quite a lot do. Their book Our Dumb World is a landmark in the history of Dead Baby Literature, as it succeeds in brutally mocking every nation on the planet. It even made a joke about the Rwandan Genocide... and it was actually funny.
- This very page showed a Google ad for a pregnancy calendar for this troper.
Print Media
- Gary Larson's Far Side comic strip at least skirted this trope at times. In one of his book-collections, he printed some of the ones that got rejected by his editors because.. they stopped skirting and plunged right in.
- In one literal case, a snake was crawling through a crib, with a huge bulge in its center. Gary Larson commented, "No, you didn't see this. Turn the page."
- Its worth noting that the real joke of the picture was that the snake became so enlarged by the bulk of the freshly consumed infant that it couldn't squeeze through the bars of the crib, and was trapped.
- There's a "Calvin&Hobbes" strip where Calvin proposes a class debate on "whether cannibalism is grounds for leniancy in murder, since it's less wasteful." No, really.
Theatre
- This guy will maintain to his dying day that Romeo and Juliet is a shining paragon of this trope. They kill themselves over a problem with the postal service.
- Indeed. In earlier drafts Shakespeare had apparently intended the play to be a comedy rather than a tragedy.
- However, for Romeo and Juliet to be a "comedy," in the Elizabethan sense, it would have had to end with a marriage, and not a death. Similarly, Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure" contains many unsettling plot points including excecution, sexual extortion, and an implied (debatebly) forced marriage. However, because it ends in a marriage, it is a comedy.
- Avenue Q. About three across-the-line jokes per song. Assuming the line is pretty far away from "tasteful". "The Internet Is For Porn ..."
- Used regularly by Christopher Durang, and quite literally in his play The Marriage of Bette and Boo, in which one of the title characters repeatedly bears stillborn children; the doctor, announcing their births, drops them on the floor.
- Sarah Kane's play 'Blasted' takes this trope one step further: Ian, one of the main characters, eats a dead baby. He is also a racist, alcoholic rapist who has had his eyes eaten by a soldier who raped him with a gun.
Videogames
- Conker's Bad Fur Day includes, among other things to offend, a literal mountain of excrement.
- This is, of course, present in the videogame version of any of the above or below, especially Happy Tree Friends the game.
- Dead Space subverts this: When the dead babies become terrifying zombies, it's treated COMPLETELY seriously! (Three back-tentacles that shoot explosive ammo.)
- However, if one jumps on your face you do get to throw it on the floor... AND PUNT DA BABY! (Which is pretty funny if you're desensitized enough).
- Batman Arkham Asylum has The Riddler provide a Dead Baby example of the riddle of the Sphinx:
Riddle: What walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon and three in the night?
Answer: A baby. Cut off it's legs and it'll still have it's arms. Give it a crutch and it will hobble on three.
Web Comics
Web Original
- The "weird Christmas song list" video of the Nostalgia Chick contains a song which tells a story of domestic violence. While the song is played, the viewers are treated to a reenactment of a southern hick beating his wife. The clip starts as serious and somewhat realistic, but then, out of nowhere, the husband starts giving his wife the "stop hitting yourself" treatment and giving her Indian burns. The scene turns from not funny into silly and then outright hilarious.
- The site dead baby joke.com which is pretty much Exactly What It Says On The Tin.
Western Animation
Other
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