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"Why did the dead baby cross the road? Because it was stapled to the chicken."
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.
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 one of The Oldest Ones In The Book.
Refuge In Vulgarity is often the reason some of these work, and others don't. Toilet Humour may also be present. Not be confused with Black Comedy.
Compare Gallows Humor.
Examples:
Live Action TV
- 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 it's 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.
- Married With Children, the first FOX network show to achieve any real popularity.
- 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 Brian 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.
- Monkey Dust focussed on the darker side of life in Britain today, with sketches involving serial killers, terrorists, and paedo-hunting mobs; playing all kinds of bizarre, horrible or disgusting behaviour for dark and disturbing laughs. Fans of the show suspect that the real reason it was cancelled after the second series was because some of the sketches were deemed to have come Too Soon.
- 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.
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, "The day may come when 'Freddy Got Fingered' is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism. The day may never come when it is seen as funny."
- 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.
- 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.
Western Animation
- South Park, most infamously.
- Literal dead babies during the Christopher Reeve stem cell episode.
- The recent and increasingly mean-spirited seasons of The Simpsons definitely qualify.
- Harvey Birdman Attorney At Law features a sickeningly tasteless joke of lawfirm boss juggling a baby with shotguns.
- Family Guy couples this brand of humor with Breathless Non Sequiturs. One recent episode applied the trope literally by featuring a sequence in which a group of "Prom Night Dumpster Babies" sing a showtune about their plight.
- The episode "The Thin White Line" presents a dilemma. Is it funnier that it looks like they're beating up kids, or that they're actually beating up midgets disguised as kids?
- This troper had trouble understanding why they would put some of the stuff they do into the show until he heard the producer state that they go out of their way to think up ways to offend people.
- Occasionally they also subvert the trope: one episode has a gag that shows a Japanese man in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Something trivially bad happens to him and he says, "How can this day get any worse?" Then he looks up and hears something falling... which turns out to be a baboon that lands on him and starts clawing at his face.
- Almost inevitably, Robot Chicken had one such sketch in which a crowd of visitors inside a maternity ward coo at a baby, only for a nurse to walk up and cover its face to illustrate that it's dead. Good stuff.
- Lampshaded in one episode where a sketch shows a mother and father arguing and showing Multiple Endings where they die. The characters in the sketch then win an award for "Darkest Sketch Ever".
- Proving that even the creators have limits, supposedly they scrapped a potential skit in which a baby is delivered stillborn, causing the doctor to work it like a hand puppet. It was (obviously) never made.
- A few of the in-house Cartoon Network Adult Swim shows lightly qualify. "Lightly" because more often, they're just flat-out insane.
- Comedy Central's "cartoon reality show" Drawn Together falls into this category, as they definitely go out of their way to be controversial and gross, sometimes at the expense of laughs.
- Happy Tree Friends combines this with as much Gorn and Grotesque Cuteness than one can possibly imagine.
Videogames
- Manhunt and Postal, despite being not comical, are most definitely Dead Baby. Postal 2 was particularly massacred by both the media and the reviewers: the media said it's the cause why the New Media Are Evil, while the reviewers saw it as pure violence and no gameplay.
- Conker's Bad Fur Day includes, among other things to offend, a literal mountain of excrement.
- The Grand Theft Auto series feature some of the most well known video game examples of this trope.
Web Comics
- Head Trip hangs a lampshade on its status as a Dead Baby Comedy by starting off with an abortion joke.
- LFG uses dead baby comedy for many of the jokes in the strip. The creators also made a short animated feature released on Youtube that is one long dead baby joke.
- How people were able to miss Cyanide and Happiness for so long is truly confusing, as the series will often go to this level and beyond.
- Sexy Losers is a classic of the genre, with comedic situations arising from disgusting and perverted sexual practices, including necrophilia and incest.
- Bigger Than Cheeses performed an ample, almost literal display of this trope in response to one of Ctrl+Alts+Del's ham-fisted dramatic storylines, with a series of arguably distasteful/controversial two-panel gags.
- And countless others, including 4chan. I'm getting pretty goddamn sick by now.
- We'd be remiss to leave out A Softer World which relies on this in frequent but creative ways. One that springs to mind.
- Lampshaded (sort of, in an incredibly disturbiing way) the very next day.
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.
Music
- (Brian) Eno's song "Baby's On Fire" is a cheerful uptempo rocker about a burning baby.
- 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.
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.
- Plus, Juliet's something like twelve.
- She's fourteen, the common age for a girl to marry at the time. Romeo is sixteen.
- Avenue Q. About three across-the-line jokes per song. Assuming the line is pretty far away from "tasteful".
- 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.
- It makes more sense in context.
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