Discussion Main / BlackCOmedy

I just 'got known' purely in order to say how odd I think the merge is. Dead Baby Comedy seems pretty different to black comedy to me, the former is intentionally aiming to shock and be offensive, that's the whole point of it. It would be possible for black comedy to be derived from something involving dead babies, but most of the examples listed don't seem like black comedy, the humour is derived purely from the offensiveness and shock value, not from a serious issue being used for comedy - I think with black comedy, there may be a tendency for there to be more of a connection to reality. There's no satire, irony or fatalism in them, just crude humour, seems more like Refuge in Vulgarity to me.

Thank you! Yes, really, there seems to be a clear difference; black comedy would be, say, X character dies while I play unfitting music. Dead Baby Comedy would perhaps be along the lines of forcing a five-year-old to watch 2 Girls 1 Cup and intending it as comedy.

"Trope Up To Eleven" is not a valid distinction - see The Same, but More. Nor do differences in audience perceptions make different tropes-

Agreed. Dead Baby comedy is, like, a really far gone version of Black Comedy.

Dead Baby Comedy was pretty vaguely defined, and was effectively being used as "Black Comedy only I think it's horrible" and "jokes about dead babies".

What you're describing (taken too far and that's why it's funny) sounds like Crosses the Line Twice, to me.

Yeah, I remember parts of the forum discussion and the difficulty in distinguishing them, but the decision to merge doesn't really make sense.

The merge seems to work very poorly, especially since there's no mention of the term "dead baby comedy" in the trope description, and there are plenty of examples from the Dead Baby Comedy page that were just dropped in, even though they reference the separate concept and were written with the perception that it was distinct from Black Comedy.

I think Dead Baby Comedy is a separate trope - as the page description for this shows, Black Comedy is when there's humor made out of death but it's still treated as serious subject, whereas Dead Baby Comedy abandons all pretenses - but I don't know if it needs its own page when there are other tropes that cover the same concept, such as Refuge in Audacity.

It could be said that Dead Baby Comedy is what happens when Black Comedy meets with Refuge in Audacity. Black Comedy by itself often Crosses the Line Twice, and maybe starts dancing over it. But when it starts ramming the line into the ground with a panzer covered in swastikas and fueled by pureed kittens, then nukes it, resulting in the deaths of several surrounding cities, it's something else altogether.

Well, to clarify my previous statement: a lot of Black Comedy has to do with people trying to cope with horrible things, and there's still an acknowledgement that it's a horrible thing. A lot of Dead Baby Comedy (such as a lot of rape jokes, for instance) totally dispense with the idea that these things are horrible, though.

Again, I don't know if Dead Baby Comedy needs its own page, but I think it should be potholed to Refuge in Audacity or Refuge in Vulgarity rather than this page. The trope description describes those two as "reveling in its own offensiveness" and "just shocking" respectively, which is basically what Dead Baby Comedy as originally defined was.

I agree with the original poster; they're two different things.

Dead Baby Comedy = comedy that achieves humor through shock value and offensiveness.

Black Comedy = Tragedy, but Played for Laughs.

An example of Dead Baby Comedy that isn't black comedy is the movie "Monty Python's The Meaning of Life". An example of black comedy that isn't Dead Baby comedy is Dr. Strangelove.