Black Comedy / Live-Action TV

Black Comedy in live-action TV.

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• 30 Rock has a continuing story arc where Jack's wife Avery is kidnapped in North Korea and forced to marry Kim Jong-Il's son. It is suggested that she is being brainwashed and raped while in captivity.
  • Also, she's forced to anchor a North Korean news program, where we see her say, "And in food news... you've had enough to eat today."
• 1000 Ways to Die, especially in its later episodes. As one tagline put it: "We glorify stupidity and put a smiley face on Death".
• Alfred Hitchcock Presents: If the story in a given episode wasn't an example of this, Hitch's intros and outros sure were (with a few exceptions).
• American Gods (2017): Right after Anansi tells a chained slave that his mother was thrown off the boat for refusing to sleep with a slaveholder and (obviously) drowned, he turns to the other slaves: "You all need to work on that. Take swimming lessons! This is how we get stereotypes."
• American Horror Story: Coven: The entire show runs on black comedy when the audience isn't straight-up horrified, this season in particular is rife with it. Examples include Myrtle stealing all of Fiona's jewellery on the way out after comforting her as she swallows a bottle of pills, Marie pulling out her phone to take pictures as a man is killed in front of her, and Nan's eulogy:
  Fiona: And so it is with great sadness we must say goodbye to Nan - (Beat) - who fell in the tub.
  Marie: Amen.
• Arrested Development provides the page image, and for good reason. It deals with issues like incest, pedophilia, mental disabilities, parental abuse, and racism for laughs. No wonder Fox ended it.
• Barry is a comedy (at first) about a hitman trying to become an actor, so it features plenty of it. One notable example is a bunch of goons discussing which The Fast and the Furious movie is best to put on to cover up the noise of decapitating people as a message to a rival gang.
• Better Call Saul also uses it to great effect:
  • The first episode opens with Jimmy defending three teens who broke into a morgue and had sex with a severed head
  • Jimmy doing back and forth with Tuco Salamanca on deciding a punishment for the skateboarders who insulted his grandma.
  • Daniel Warmold, a client under investigation for suspected drug dealing, being shooed out of his own police interrogation so that his lawyer can spin a lie about him stashing videos of himself sitting in pie while crying.
• The Big Bang Theory:
  "One of the test monkeys slipped on a banana peel and broke his neck. It was both tragic and hysterical."
  • In one episode, Bernadette lets slip that she accidentally released a combination of ebola and the common cold. Leonard asks "Why would you do that?" and she replies, with a big smile on her face, "We didn't. That would be a terrible, terrible thing."
• Blackadder is full of this, but especially Blackadder Goes Forth, being a spoof of the First World War. For example:
  [characters are sneaking through a minefield]
  George: Sir, what should we do if we happen to trod on a mine?
  Blackadder: [Beat] Well Lieutenant, standard procedure is to leap 200 feet into the air, and scatter yourself over a wide area.
  George: Right on, then.
• Black Mirror aims at being a drama with heapings of black comedy as it looks at the way technology alters humanity into something worse. Some episodes, however, seem to drop the "comedy" part of the equation.
• Breaking Bad to the bone. The infamous "bathtub drop" is listed on the series' Nightmare Fuel and Funny Moments pages. However, as the series went on and the stakes got higher and higher, the comedy was gradually shed.
• The Brink A dark political comedy set around an international crisis, after Pakistan is taken over in a coup d'etat.
• The Brittas Empire: A big part of the show's appeal is its blend of wacky Work Com antics and pitch black humour, with customer and worker deaths being par for the course.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Oz's band is called Dingoes Ate My Baby, a reference to the real life tragedy made famous by the movie A Cry In The Dark.
  • Justified after the eponymous character sacrifices her life to save Dawn (and the world), only for her friends to rip her from heaven. Buffy reacts to this noble yet traumatizing act by, among other things, using Black Comedy as a coping mechanism. Buffy's friends catch on, making this Played for Drama.
• The Carmichael Show contains many jokes about racism, death, rape, poverty, abortion, and general Comedic Sociopathy, from Jerrod's apathy about serious issues to how brutally honest and tasteless his parents can be.
• Australian comedy team The Chaser had their show The Chaser's 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 negative reaction to the sketch, including from Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
  • 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. (Although the fact that The Mansion practically had no viewership by comparison may have contributed too.)
  • 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 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 Cleaner (UK): A lot of laughs are mined out of death and decay even in episodes that don't feature blood and gore.
• Cluedo: The short films of evidence are usually quite comic, despite being about murder. The victim is usually highly obnoxious, and most of the upper-class suspects entertaining to watch.
  Professor Plum: One does get used to death at Arlington Grange.
• The Colbert Report has an instance of dead puppy humor. They claim the oldest dog in the world is 23 - well, now they've found a 24 year-old dog! ...Never mind. (The dog shows up alive later on.)
• Corporate LIVES off of this trope. A dark reimagining of the modern Work Com, it regularly jokes about suicide, the capitalist depression and the hellhole of modern life and relationships.
• Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a musical comedy show about Rebecca Bunch, a young lawyer in New York who moves across the country to West Covina, California, to be near her ex-boyfriend Josh Chan. Except sometimes her stalker behavior doesn't seem so cute, like when she becomes obsessed with Valencia, Josh's girlfriend, and sings about wanting to wear her skin. Not cute, but still hilarious:
  I wanna lock you in a basement,
  But in that basement, you would also be my personal trainer
  (I want your abs!)
  Break into your mom’s house, collect your baby teeth,
  And turn them in to my new retainer
  (I want your smile!)
• CSI: NY Mac is not amused when a fellow officer invokes this trope after a suspect falls to her death trying to jump from one rooftop to another.
  Robert Hicks: [grinning slightly] Heard you had a falling out with Carmen Vega earlier today.
  Mac Taylor: [frowning] Young lady made a bad decision. Paid for it with her life.
  Robert Hicks: [apologetically] Gallows humor. Occupational hazard, I suppose.
• Dead Like Me did this as well. The first guy reaped (besides George) comes in at the tail end of a bank holdup in which no less than two guns are being waved around and the entire top floor explodes. The victim dies slipping on a banana peel.
• Doctor Who dips into this occasionally as part of its Genre Roulette and Monster of the Week nature.
  • "The Romans", as one can imagine by doing a comedy story set in Emperor Nero's palace. Barbara is made a slave with no rights or ability to get home to her own time, and Nero attempts to rape her multiple times (even chasing her down the corridors while she screams), and it's all treated as the horrible fate it is, and yet all Played for Laughs.
  • "Terror of the Autons", an Attack of the Killer Whatever story about the Master killing people in hilariously silly ways. One side character get crushed to death and left by the Master for the Doctor to find, in his own lunchbox. Another side character is eaten by a suspiciously warm inflatable chair. The Master has a friendly phone conversation with the Doctor and then tries to murder him by sending a signal down the telephone that makes its cord wrap around the Doctor and start crushing him. 40,000 people are suffocated by daffodils. The Master's Complexity Addiction is played completely for laughs. It's one of the funniest episodes of the original series ever, and was also so nasty that the producer had to publicly apologise and promise the Moral Guardians that he'd never make anything like that again.
  • The Fourth Doctor's cute, Nightmare Fetishist personality is used many times to milk amusement out of some really dark topics such as torture and murder, such as through Bad News in a Good Way or by just providing the Bathos needed to start playing it for laughs.
  • "The Empty Child": The Doctor, not knowing he's arrived during the Blitz, walks up to the mic at a bar and asks, completely seriously, if anything's fallen from the sky lately. The audience's laughter suggests they think he's invoking this trope.
  • "Rise of the Cybermen": Mr. Crane's choice of music to be played at the Cybus Industries factory ("The Lion Sleeps Tonight") doesn't quite cover up the screams of the people being Cyber-converted inside it.
  • John Simm's portrayal of the Master is made of this. In "The Sound of Drums", for instance, there's the scene where he gasses the Cabinet… after insulting them all, and the scene where he eavesdrops on Vivien Rook's Sound-Only Death by opening and closing the door a couple times to wince at her screams.
  • "Amy's Choice": There's something morbidly hilarious about watching the Doctor shove an old lady (alien-possessed, but still) off of a roof with a lamp.
  • "The Crimson Horror": One would think that an innocent horse about to be (almost) executed would be tragic… but not when it's Strax doing it.
  • Missy, Michelle Gomez's version of the Master, delights in ordering people she's about to kill to "Say something nice" first.
• The Drew Carey Show: Occasionally:
  Drew: Wow, Lewis. That was fast. How did you learn to tie ties like that?
  Lewis: Oh, at Drug-Co we like to make the monkeys believe that we're going to turn them into people, before killing them. When they go into that room, all dressed up, there's nothing but a fat guy with a hammer...
• ER occasionally, sometimes in-universe, as a means for the doctors and nurses to cope with the tragedies they've witnessed. After Dr Romano was crushed by a falling helicopter after having already lost his arm to a helicopter rotor, Dr Pratt commented "That guy must have really pissed off a helicopter in a past life."
  • Med student Lucy Knight once misplaced a corpse and was rather freaked out when the corpse's twin brother arrived to collect the body.
  • When Dr Greene was told two men were in the ER for fist fighting his response was "How quaint."
  • When a burn victim comes in, they tend to call them "crispy critters".
• Everybody Hates Chris is full of this: much of the humor comes from the torment Chris has suffered from, as well as the general racism from the time period he’s forced to endure.
• Fawlty Towers: Fawlty Towers tended to focus more on the specific kind of story that it perfected, but there were a number of premises and moments that were extremely dark.
  • "The Kipper and the Corpse" features a scene where Basil is overjoyed that a guest's death wasn't because of his own negligence.
  • Another episode features Basil locking one of his employees in a burning kitchen because he's too stubborn and obtuse to realize that there is a fire and it's not just a drill.
• When Freddy Krueger hosted his own show, Freddy's Nightmares, he would frequently use Cryptkeeper-style lines and delivery.
• Game of Thrones: Although the series is very bleak in tone overall, it does not take itself seriously enough for there to be no laughs. Especially when much of the humour stems from making light of all the horrible things that happen.
  • Roose Bolton is often doing this.
  • And Ramsay takes after his dad in this regard.You may never look at a sausage the same way again...
  • Brynden Tully, an old man who is going off to attack thousands of invaders literally by himself, knows he's going to his death. He draws his sword and cheekily remarks to Brienne that he hasn't fought in years, and is probably going to look foolish doing so.
• Often used in Goodness Gracious Me as a way to tackle controversial subjects. Examples include:
  • A mock advertisement for the fire-proof "Asbestos Sari", designed to prevent the wearer from meeting an untimely death in a "kitchen accident" (a common euphemism for women being murdered due to Honor-Related Abuse.)
  • An Indian woman runs into a women's shelter screaming that her husband attacked her with a knife. The white woman running the shelter refuses to help until she's certain that it was a kitchen knife and not a ceremonial knife, in which case it would be a cultural matter and the shelter will not be able to intervene. This goes on for so long that the knife-wielding husband breaks in and the white woman does nothing.
  • A recurring sketch in the second series involved an elderly Indian woman being interviewed about her life during the time of the British Raj. She would begin with an innocuous memory which would turn into something horrific (such as being raped by British soldiers or having her entire village massacred) but then end on a "happier" note about the soldiers' beautifully polished boots or the army commander having previously given the village children sweets, always ending in her catchphrase: "Wonderful days!"
  • A parody of The Sooty Show where Soo is Sooty's widow and due to be burned on his funeral pyre (sati) due to cultural tradition. She explains that she thinks this is barbaric - and ends up being stoned for adultery instead.
  • A Teletubbies parody where each of the Teletubbies represents one of the religious/ethnic groups fighting for control of Kashmir. Po's Expy is eventually beaten to death by the others for trying to suggest that they reach a peaceful solution.
  • Any of the sketches about racism, caste differences or sectarian violence.
  • When the cast returned twenty years after the original radio series for a one-off TV special, they returned to form with a Mary Poppins parody critical of corporal punishment in Indian families.
• Gotham may as well be called Black Comedy: The Show; part of the show's charm is how ridiculously over-the-top and grimdark it gets at times, sailing straight past bleakness into genuine hilarity. It helps when the cast includes characters such as the Joker and the Riddler.
  Ed Nygma: You hijacked my body while I was asleep and stole my dead girlfriend?!
• On Grandmas House, Simon Amstell's general brand of comedy is quite depressing and dark. The whole show remains funny while dealing with at least mildly racist characters,abuse, and disconnect from humanity.
• Hannibal: Showrunner Bryan Fuller sprinkles cannibal double entendres throughout the show, and comedic actors like Eddie Izzard and Scott Thompson help feed into the bleak, funny vibe.
  Lecter: Before we begin eating, you must all be warned: Nothing here... is vegetarian. Bon appétit.
• 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.'"
• Due to the subject matter (historical edutainment), Horrible Histories indulges in this at almost all times. Frequent topics include dead/abused children, murder, torture, dismemberment, people getting beaten to death, suicide, war crimes, decapitation and incest. In a show at least nominally aimed at eight-year-olds. There's even a recurring feature called "Stupid Deaths" in which a kooky Death character laughs at historical figures for dying in ways that usually involve toilets. It's possible the real nastiness of it flies over the heads of its target audience, while doing lots to attract a Periphery Demographic.
• How I Met Your Mother:
  • "Brunch" revolves around Ted’s parents hiding the fact that they’ve been divorced for several years from him. This is apparently something they do a lot, and the episode ends with them promising to be more honest from now on. Ted then asks how grandma is doing and why she hasn’t returned his calls, while Ted’s parents share a concerned look.
  • “Knight Vision” has what is probably the most mean-spirited jokes in the series. Ted attempts to hook up with a woman named Cassie, who then suffers a massive Trauma Conga Line. She is fired, her car is stolen, she gets ditched by her parents and she catches the flue, all while Ted awkwardly spends the evening trying to get rid of her while showing No Sympathy. Meanwhile, Barney and Robin run into trouble when their minister grills them about how they met, and when they tell him the truth of their promiscuous pasts he actually dies from shock. Finally, Ted gives a toast to said priest and everything seems fine...until Cassie walks into the room.
    Cassie: Uncle Robert died?
• iCarly uses this on occasion:
  • "iQuit iCarly": T-Bo talks about his best friend Eddie Robinson who was hit by a bus and now became "Dead-die Robinson".
  • "iMove Out": Spencer jokes that their aunt died falling out of a "winder". He quickly amends that the cause of death is a heart attack.
  • "iPsycho": The old clown in Nora's birthday party suffered an aneurysm and was transported via a gurney, implied he can't make it through.
  • "iBeat the Heat": "When the temperature gets too high, the elderly will start to DIE!"
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia fills its episodes with taboo comedy, riffing on such topics as dumpster babies, statutory rape, crack addiction, and cannibalism.
  • Arguably spends just as much time succumbing to Vulgar Humor as this trope, if not more.
• Inside No. 9 makes extensive usage of plot twisting as a medium for the trope particularly towards the end, resulting in something bizarre yet aptly unexpected.
• The Kids in the Hall. One example would be Bruce's monologue apologizing for causing cancer:
  "I'm sorry I caused all that throat cancer and all that bowel cancer. I was just on a roll..."
• Laid, a 2011 Australian series about a woman who discovers that her former lovers have started dying in various strange and unexpected circumstances.
• 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. "Puking Pure-blood Lady" projectile vomits whenever she is told that someone of a different ethnic origin prepared the food she is being served.
• In "Guy walks into an Advertising Agency" of Mad Men, a newly appointed executive's foot gets run over by a lawn mower in the office. The poor fellow lost his foot and his job because "he'll never golf again". Despite the gruesome outcome, that scene was really funny. And some comments on the event were pure gold.
  Roger Sterling: Any news?
  Paul Kinsey: He might lose his foot.
  Roger Sterling: Right when he got it in the door.
• Malcolm in the Middle. Child abuse, terrorism, sociopathy... nothing is sacred.
• The infamous "Undertaker's Sketch" from episode 26 of Monty Python's 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.
• In Britain, Chris Morris' show Jam depended almost entirely on this, even featuring a 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. Joe 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 Adam refuses to film any more, and storms off the set while Joe 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◊. Just remember, the girl on the left was 15 years old when the article was printed.
• Murdoch Mysteries: Several characters employ dark humour to deal with the frequent deaths they encounter, including:
  • Dr. Ogden makes jokes on occasion, including holding up a skull she's been boiling and quoting Shakespeare's Hamlet: "Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio!"
  • Dr. Grace is also very prone to this. On being presented with a headless corpse in "Murdoch in Toyland", she quips about it being a former resident of Sleepy Hollow, "Ichabod Crane, perhaps." When she and Murdoch are investigating a vibrating electrical chair in which a man died, she sits in it as Murdoch is trying the controls; her reaction (and his) are very much Played for Laughs.
  • Constable Crabtree, speaking of a new grave a convent of nuns planned to use for one of their members, jokes about the fact that her place had been already taken by the murder victim of the week.
  • Murdoch flirts with this once in "Stroll on the Wild Side" when Constable Higgins describes how the tram car murder victim was seen conversing with another man who exited the car before it left the station. Higgins says the second man may have been "just seeing him on his way", and Murdoch remarks on the turn of phrase. Higgins stares at Murdoch blankly.
• My Dead Ex: Ben is killed while spray-painting a love note for Charley onto a sign. Afterward, they use the last blurred selfie he took right then in his memorial at school, which he complains of. Later, he gets shot repeatedly (with his wounds healing instantly) to his annoyance. He feared telling people about being undead, thinking he might be experimented on off in a secret lab somewhere. Then when he's outed as undead, a doctor openly admits that they indeed would have done this if it was the 80's, and misses those days.
• My World… and Welcome to It: Some of the humorous elements in the series derive from dark situations not ordinarily considered comedic, with a few instances crossing into Values Dissonance territory.
  • John imagines his wife being hung from a chandelier by her neck after she says too many things that irritate him in "Man Against the World."
  • The episode "Dear Is a Four-Letter Word" sees John daydreaming that school principal Otto Shultz, who called him into his office to discuss Lydia, gradually morphs into a blustering Adolf Hitler. Subverted in that once John begins to actually listen to what the principal has to say, he realizes the man is very reasonable and sympathetic to John’s viewpoint (unlike Lydia’s teacher, Miss Skidmore, who initiated the complaint).
  • In "The Shrike and the Chipmunks," children's book author George Lockhart is unable to write a commissioned story for The Manhattanite until he allows himself to produce a work that's notably Darker and Edgier than his usual output. Titled after this episode, the story is loaded with deadpan snark, one in which the depicted animal characters behave foolishly and end up dead.
• Never Have I Ever: Ben's encounter with a middle-aged creep he met online, who promised him friendship and bonding over their favorite cartoon, is depicted somewhat lightheartedly. Though the show makes it clear that the man is a sexual predator and Ben quickly gets the hell out when he realizes he's not just there to talk about cartoons.
• On Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Simon Amstell made a joke about Courtney Love. Team captain Noel Fielding tells him that Courtney is pretty tough, and he should watch out or she could beat him up. Simon's reply: "Yes ... or she could kill me and make it look like suicide!"
  • A graphic immediately appears at the bottom of the screen that reads "Disclaimer: Simon Amstell is definitely wrong".
• The Night Shift 2007 doesn't deal specifically with death, but it's like The Office off its meds and stars a Dysfunction Junction. The viewpoint character is clinically depressed, The Ditz is too incompetent to ever live a normal life and tragically waiting for a dream that can never come true, and the Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist Jaded Washout is a "psycho" whose issues with his Abusive Parents are examined seriously and deconstructed in The Movie.
• As the title might suggest, One Foot in the Grave was a Brit Com about Reluctant Retiree Victor Meldrew looking for ways to occupy his time and featured an uncommonly large amount of material, humour and otherwise, touching on old age, death, loneliness and having to put up with everyone else.
• Peep Show is an example of this, as every character on the show is a terrible person that often commits unspeakable and downright depraved acts such as eating a dog.
• Psychopath Diary: Much of the series' humour is dark. Highlights include Dong-sik planning to kidnap Ji-hoon only to realise an adult is too heavy to carry around in a bag and Dong-sik preparing to kill Ji-hoon then being interrupted by the phone.
• Pushing Daisies seemed like the writers were competing to make the most gruesome death imaginable while still counting as slapstick.
• The Revolution Will Be Televised often goes into some fairly dark issues such as war and human rights abuse. Most of the humour derives from Heydon and Jolyon's characters seeking to exploit them for whatever reason. Examples include the Camp Gay host of "Double Fist TV" wanting to go to MI6's torture chambers because he finds that stuff kinky, or Dale Mailey's incredibly politically incorrect views being used to mock the far-right.
• One Saturday Night Live skit that was seriously reviled was "First He Cries", riffing on the book/tv movie "First You Cry" dealing with breast cancer - this one focuses on the stricken woman's dickish, self-centered husband (played by Bill Murray). It gets Harsher in Hindsight as the woman, who faces her situation with good cheer and resolve, is played by Gilda Radner.
• 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 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 dark 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 dark humour 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.
  • During one of the Brain Trust Meetings:
    I propose we get "Hello Kitty" toe tags. You know, for the dead children.
  • Also in one episode while a character was talking the elevator door behind him kept freaking out, closing most of the way before bouncing back open. After Kelso is done talking the camera pans down to show a full body bag lying halfway in the elevator with the doors repeatedly hitting it. Doug later comes and picks it up.
  • Scrubs is extremely dark when you look close. Dr. Cox, Kelso, Jordan, Ted, Denise/Jo ...
    You know, it's ironic that cancer starts with "can", because at this stage there's nothing we can do about it.
  • Another episode has JD complain about Doug putting toetags on patients who weren't even dead yet because he got bored. JD also "borrows" a body from the morgue to teach his interns a lesson.
  • One episode has JD hide in a body bag and when he tried to get out, Doug started hitting him with a fire extinguisher. When JD asks why he was hitting him, he said he thought it was a corpse coming back to life and "dead people should be dead".
  • When J.D. got commentary from everyone regarding Elliot's engagement, Doug's two cents was to demonstrate how J.D. must be feeling by squeezing a donated heart until it explodes. "Don't tell anyone" indeed.
  • Dr. Kelso openly admits he neglected patients to get the top score of an arcade game and that patients died.
• Seinfeld.
  • Season 7 ended with the unexpected death of George's fiancée, Susan (from licking toxic glue from cheap wedding invitations he picked out). His reaction? A moment of silence, followed by going out with his friends for coffee. It Gets Worse. During the post-credits scene, he calls another woman, tells her his fiancée recently died, and asks if she's free this weekend.
    • Jason Alexander (who played George) himself has said he feels that Seinfeld is "a very dark show about very dark people".
    Did a dingo eat your baby?
• The Sopranos is a gritty portrayal of the mob life where the hypocritical nature and sociopathic deeds of the characters generate humor, sometimes bordering on the absurd while keeping the realistic feel. The show places such an emphasis on humor that David Chase is quoted as once having said that sometimes he and the writers weren't sure whether they were making a drama or a comedy.
• Spitting Image: Numerous jokes about violence, death, religion, drugs, war, nuclear accidents and often including real-life celebrities in the comedy. Their lawyers often told them that the only reason they could get away with all this was because it was a puppet show.
• Succession is filled to the brim with this, to the point where some fans wonder if it's really a drama or if it's black satire. Perhaps the biggest example is the Season 2 episode "Safe Room."
  • Connor and his girlfriend Willa attend the funeral of Waystar employee Lester, whom the family nicknamed "Mo" (Mo-Lester) after his inability to keep his hands to himself. Connor is excited as he only sees the funeral as an opportunity to gain backers for his presidential campaign.
  Connor: (to the tune of Happy Birthday) Happy death-day to Mo, happy death-day to Mo!
  • Outside the church, the two meet Lester's grieving widow. Willa (who was not let in on the joke) proceeds to offer her condolences on "Mo's" passing, leading Connor to drag her away from the confused woman and explain the joke.
  • Connor refuses to give a prospective Logan Roy biographer any quotes on the funeral, instead saying "Connor Roy was interested in politics from a very young age" repeatedly.
  • The aforementioned biographer hopes to gain something from Connor's planned eulogy (which includes the proposed line "Lester touched all of us"), leading Willa to hastily write a new one. Her inability to write anything good leads to this gem.
  Connor: Hello. I'm here as a fellow human to acknowledge that Lester has, as we know, passed on. Lester was a man. Also, Lester was an employee of the Waystar company for 40 years. And when a man dies, it is sad. All of us will die one day. In this case, it is Lester that has done so. Lester was alive for 78 years. But no more. Now he is dead. Lester's wife is Maria. They were married for 15 years. Now she is sad.
  • Over in the Waystar offices, Tom and Greg talk about the ethics of keeping a Neo-Nazi anchorman at the news network, while using a human footstool.
  • Tom interviews Mark Ravenhead, the suspected Neo-Nazi. Highlights include Ravenhead having had his wedding at one of Hitler's favourite vacation places, his denial that he named his dog after Hitler's dog Blondi (the spelling is different), and these lines:
  Tom: Just to fend this off, have you ever read Mein Kampf?
  Mark: Um, yeah, couple times, I guess.
  Tom: Couple times? Are there Easter eggs in there you didn't get the first time?
  Tom: (later) And what, specifically, do you find interesting about that period of history?
  Mark: The scale. The tragedy.
  Tom: Hell yeah. Which tragedy, speciifically?
  Mark: Europe decimated. Seven million Germans, twenty million Russians, five million Poles.
  Tom: Yeah. Just checking the till, Mark, and it seems you're short a few million there.
• A significant portion of the comedy in Supernatural, especially in the episode "Mystery Spot" which has a hilarious Death Montage. See "Groundhog Day" Loop for more.
  • Any time the Trickster shows up. Even after his death, he's still the funniest guy on the show.
• Swarm is a black comedy horror series about a young woman obsessed with a pop star cutting a bloody swath through the United States to find her idol.
• Tales from the Crypt would often have its host the Crypt Keeper make macabre puns about the nasty fates suffered by the people in his stories.
• In a Taxi episode it's revealed that every time after Mr. McKenzie and his wife quarrel, Mrs. McKenzie usually takes revenge on him by taking a male cabbie to her home for dinner, and after that the cabbie disappears mysteriously; the latest casualty being a driver called "Curly" Melnick. Now it's Louie whom is picked by her, and he's obviously unsure about what will happen to him.
  Louie: Who was the one that said "I'll be back"?
  Alex: I think it was "Curly" Melnick.
• The Quiz Broadcast sketches in That Mitchell and Webb Look, focusing on a Game Show taking place in a post-apocalyptic world. The host is desperate to treat everything with the joviality of a typical quiz show, even though humanity is obviously doomed.
  Host: Pre-Event sources talk of hope. What was "hope"?
  • The "Elderly Sherlock Holmes" sketch is initially played for Black Comedy laughs as Dr. Watson desperately tries to pretend that Holmes, who has succumbed to dementia, is still the razor-sharp mind he always was. It's then immediately subverted when Holmes, in a moment of clarity, reveals to John that he knows what's happening to him.
    • It is implied that this scene was a homage to Blackadder, which ended on a similarly serious note. In a previous skit Mitchell and Webb, as themselves, discuss the ending of Blackadder and agree to end on a serious, dramatic sketch. The following scene takes a serious subject matter, the death of a colleague - but the hamminess is played for laughs.
• The Thick of It. A grimly accurate portrayal of the self-serving political system and incredibly, impossibly funny. Even the suicide jokes.
  • The series is notorious for its one liners, often chock-a-block with words unrepeatable pre-watershed. Its film adaptation/spiritual successor/sister show played an unjust war and the deaths of millions of Iraqis for laughs.
    Malcolm: I'd love to stay and chat with you, but I'd rather have Type 2 diabetes.
    (To Phil Smith)
    Malcolm: I will tear your fucking skin off, I will wear it to your mother's birthday party, and rub your nuts up and down her leg whilst whistling Bohemian Rhapsody. Right?
• Titus was about domestic violence, child abuse, alcoholism and mental illness, and was one of the funniest things on TV during its run.
• 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".
• Two and a Half Men runs on this trope. Most of the humour in this show is based on Charlie's chronic alcoholism and misogynistic sexual activities with women. If not that, then it's usually about Alan being a punching bag, being mistreated by his family, his ex-wife, losing everything, or being humiliated, until he eventually becomes a Jerkass in later seasons, in no small part due to his constant misfortunes. Even Charlie's death is Played for Laughs, with all of the women spitting in his coffin and his funeral being a big insult and joke being an attempt of the episode to be funny. Sometimes, with the right delivery, it can be funny, but other times it can be distasteful.
• Waiting for God. Considering its name is (presumably) an allusion to the famous play by Samuel Beckett, and that it's set in an old people's home...
• The Wire: Chris Partlow and Felicia "Snoop" Pearson, two walking specters of death, often have some of the funniest moments of the show while they are carrying out murders in cold-blood. Snoop's purchase of a nail gun they use solely to cover up over 20 homicides is easily one of the show's best comedic moments.
  • "Daaaaaaaamn! You didn't even wait 'til we was in the house!"
• Wilfred: There are almost no traditional jokes in the entire series. Just about everything that happens is both dark and funny. Most jokes revolve around death, suffering, depression, crime, pain, and abuse. Some jokes are just plain weird but its mostly black humor for all four seasons.
• Wizards of Waverly Place: Used occasionally.
  Max: Hey look! The monster hunters left behind their equipment to help us. Wait, what are we supposed to do with this pile of charred bones?
• The X-Files:
  • "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" is surprisingly funny considering it's all about the terrible horror that results from being able to see the future accurately and the inevitability of death. Very, very grim. But also very, very funny. Mr. Brockman's wisecracks and his deadpan shows-off with Mulder and Scully are especially memorable.
  • "Je Souhaite" was a light-hearted episode with two stupid brothers wishing a few unfortunate things who died in an explosion.

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