Although many stories from The Onion don't involve this, quite a lot do. Their book Our Dumb World is a landmark in the history of black comedy literature, as it succeeds in brutally mocking every nation on the planet.
The foundation of Less is Morgue is dark comedy around death.
Pizza Ghost Jon: Jesus. So that was it? That was life? Riley: Yeah, surprisingly short and uneventful, wasn't it? Pizza Ghost Jon: Well yeah, thanks to you, it was!
This very page has shown various Google ads that qualify as this due to the juxtaposition, ranging from a pregnancy calendar to "5 Ways to Help Baby Sleep". "Intelligent keywords" are comedy gold.
He compares the Disney Corporation post-Walt's death as a chicken with its head cut off... complete with footage of a just-beheaded chicken leaping around.
In his teaser for his Captain EO review, he mentions the review will premiere on Sept 12 2011, 25 years after the ride opened. "There aren't any other big anniversaries around that date, are there?"
"Sponge Boi Me Bob!" is basically this. It's a meme where Mr. Krabs from SpongeBob SquarePants is depicted in a distorted image saying a greeting, usually "Sponge Boi (Boy) Me Bob!" and then saying something disturbing, occasionally followed by "Argargargargargargarg!"
Harrison Callifrax's A Study In Fear is most definitely this, central around themes of fear and death for the majority of the humour. Example being the overly vicious white kitten that eats human flesh.
The YouChewPoop forums has a topic devoted to these sorts of jokes. Possibly the funniest/most offensive is this:
Manwith10toes: What did the blind, deaf, mute, crippled, retarded kid get for Christmas? Cancer.
This parody from Funny Or Die, poking fun at politician Todd Akin's comments that women can't get pregnant from rape.
There's a short scene in If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device when overjoyed Magnus, while playing with his new jetbike, runs over a couple of playing children. In fact, there are several segments of characters being absolutely heartless and playing it off for laughs:
In the second podcast the two of the three Custodes talk about killing traitorous babies while a Chaos priest acts exasperated at their so-so attitudes.
From the third podcast a small boy gets ceramic shards in his eye and is told to hate it he can power through it.
The High Lords of Terra acting like grumpy old men, passing pointless laws like banning oxygen and sucking funds from the Imperium to eventually retire and feel like "useless [pieces] of shit" in their own words.
Lucius the Eternal doing things to children and acting like a maniac while talking like a teen girl. Fabius Bile makes half-baked clones and acts like a sicker puppy than Lucius. The list goes on.
BuzzFeed Unsolved often dips into this with Shane and Ryan frequently joking about things like murder, serial killers, ghosts, death, creepy places, and demons in order to lighten the mood. You'll hear the terrifying details of a crime scene, and then it'll cut to Shane and Ryan making snarky commentary.
The Nostalgia Chick has loved this trope ever since her "Top Ten Disturbing And Inescapable Christmas Songs" list. It 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.
NC: (grinning) My apologies to the neighbor's cat, it's just... after seeing a film that was so... cat-killingly bad, I had no choice but to destroy the nearest living creature.
Also, the Critic's habit of killing himself on a regular basis.
Pixies Production's parody of Drake & Josh, ''Drew and Jacob'', which plays up death and the insanity of the Josh Expy for laughs, despite being taken seriously by the characters themselves.
Hero House pretty much runs on a combination of this and snark.
I'm a Marvel... And I'm a DC can make almost any character into a black comic. For one, at The Joker's funeral, Harley Quinn asks new beau Green Goblin if he has any words. Double G responds with "I'm sure he knows exactly what I'm thinking..."
I'm doing your girl; I'm glad you're dead. I'm doing your girl; I'm glad you're dead. I'm doing your girl; I'm glad you're dead.
Marble Hornets has a number of moments like this in the second season, particularly with Alex's reactions to Jay's incredibly stupid behavior. In particular, in Entry #46, Jay sneaks into Alex's house, only to be interrupted when he spots the resident Humanoid Abominationright outside and hears Alex coming in. He hides in a closet. Then we get this:
Alex: Hey, Jay. You forgot your flashlight.
The Stalker Song plays up the stalking behaviors of a Psycho Ex-Boyfriend for laughs. Even when he kidnaps the girl's cat and threatens to harm him unless the girl gives him attention, it's still pretty funny.
Forobvious reasons, most of the humor that does pop up in Survival of the Fittest tends to be of either this nature or Crosses the Line Twice. Then again, that's the only real way you can laugh at terrorists abducting teenagers and forcing them to kill each other.
The Jerry series is rife with it. Particularly in this installment. When Jerry's dad hears his son committed suicide, he giggles and says, nostalgically, "Oh, man, that is just so... something he'd do."
Subverted in the Las Vegas Bloodbath review, where the Snob has prepared a list of jokes to go with a scene in the movie where the killer murders a pregnant woman and cuts out her unborn child... but then he decides that the jokes are all too tasteless and offensive to actually use, so he just shows a clip from another movie instead.
Played straight in the 80's Dan Christmas special.
And in the Snob's review of Antropophagus. The reaction to the infamous "killer rips a pregnant's unborn child out of her and devours it" is Brad showing how the eating should be done with a doll.
And I just ate a fucking fetus!
An early episode of I'm a Marvel... And I'm a DC has Superman dropping his baby son after Spider-Man suggests that being an illegitimate father will tarnish his image. After dropping the kid, Superman reacts with an "ooooooooops".
12 Uses Of Dead Babies. As a matter of fact, Newgrounds has a collection of shorts called BASTARDS with plenty of shorts that cross the line and are guaranteed to irk you... Yet, they may also be guaranteed to make you laugh as well, and if they do, CONGRATULATIONS! You're a heartless bastard!
Played straight in Full Metal Panic!: The Abridged Series with Gauron's segment of the show. He tells 9/11 jokes in one episode, but the creator admitted that was too harsh.
In the wake of the Haitian earthquake, an image of one of the delapidated areas was passed around with the caption - "Hold F11 - if you laugh, you're a horrible person."note Pressing F11 causes the window to maximize to having no boundaries, and holding it causes the image to shake repeatedly
Noob made a couple of most dire situations quite funny:
First is Master Zen's backstory. Due to his Hair-Trigger Temper, he once got so annoyed by Sparadrap that he ended up throwing his computer out the window. There was a old lady under that window and he's now in jail due to the incident. The whole story is however treated as "just to give you an idea of how bad Sparadrap can screw up things" at the time it's told to Gaea.
Later on, the top professional player of the game looses his job after the game creator gets him blamed for his own illegal activities. The visible consequences? First, people (all male) crying over it get a "What's this? You guys are all wimps" comment from one of the female characters. Second, an episode has the protagonists go to find the person who the worst hit by the events (bad enough for genuine depression) and try to give him a pep talk. Joke of the day? The protagonists giving the worst pep talk ever while its intended recipient remains completely unresponsive.
Todd in the Shadows: in his Firework/Born This Way combination review, plays this for dark irony, by showing himself sitting at a computer drinking and attempting to kill himself with a toy gun immediately after talking about his glamorous, jet-setting life.
Everything about Kakos Industries is ridden with comedy derived from psychological torture, strange and depraved festivals, and the number of snarky, vulgar comments throughout.
Tony is Back, a series of spoof commercials for Frosted Flakes featuring Tony the Tiger helping out the kids who were in his commercials 30 years ago, now all grown up. Said adults are now a prostitute, a cop savagely beating a woman on the side of the road, and a suicide bomber in a diner. It's all completely Played for Laughs.
A similar thing happened with the Guinness World Record website. The website had a feature where you could click a star and attempt to break that record. One of the records you could break was Most Individuals Killed In A Terrorist Act!◊
In "I REFUSE TO DIE - Respawn Man (Part 1/4)" by Santoro Gaming, Matt plays Respawn Man, a game where he plays as a character who can come back to life numerous times and leave his corpses behind when he dies. In one part of the video, his character drowns in a body of water, and when his character gets resurrected, he decides to use his character’s corpse as a boat for no reason other than comedy.
SuperMarioLogan: The show mostly has upbeat humor, however many scenes in the show are this trope.
Nearly any scene involving Bowser have him beating the hell out of his son while his son screams "OW!!!" until Bowser calms down. Granted, Bowser Jr. usually starts it.
The episode "Bowser Junior's Punishment!" has Junior reacting to being in the corner for five minutes akin to a man who's been in solitary prison for a decade.
One Charleyyy and Friends episode is about Charleyyy daring to eat an onion without crying, only for him to breakdown about his dad leaving him as a child. Bowser laughs.
In another during the Luigi's Mansion arc, Charleyyy dances in the street recklessly and gets hit by a car. Bowser notes he's even funnier when dead.
In yet another, Charleyyy notes it is Mother's Day and he's with his beautiful baby daughter. He then switches to a deadpan speech as he admits his daughter doesn't have a mother because she left, and then hurls his daughter down the stairs, with Bowser laughing at how hilarious it is. It's just a baby doll, but still.
Doofy the Dragon is a kids show involving Doofy singing about drugs, testicles, and killing. He always kills himself at the end of each episode, and Bowser Jr. laughs.
Doofy: (singing) Twinkle, twinkle, little star I have drugs inside my car If the cops show up I'm (BLEEP) I might as well give myself up. (cue police siren) Oh (BLEEP), there's the cops, I gotta run I'm gonna kill myself with this gun. (shoots self) Junior:(laughs) That's so funny, Doofy!
"Home Alone" has Junior killing one of three criminals by dropping a bowling ball on her, and putting one of them in the oven, after both of which he electrocutes the last one unconscious and ties him to the tracks with the intent to cut his head off. Officer Goodman arrives in time, though, and arrests the last criminal before being executed. Junior is not charged, however. What makes this even darker is that when the first criminal dies, both of the remaining ones note that the first one just recently had a kid and didn't even want to be here, and the second criminal who dies steals Junior's Thomas & Friends toy because his son has always wanted one.
Black Yoshi spends most of his episodes committing jokes like this. He kills Joseph "CharleyBrown678" for cutting his electricity, and shoots Junior's toys when he acts like a brat.
1. How many planes were hijacked on 9/11? A. 2. B. 4. C 7. D. 45.
1. How many people died in the Holocaust? A. 11 Million. B. 6 Million. C. 17 Trillion. D. 12.
The Brooklyn Guy notes how ridiculous these answers are, especially mad at the question writer for putting "12" as a logical possible answer to the number of people who died in the Holocaust.
Brooklyn Guy: How many— (sees question and sighs) How, wow, already. Okay, how many planes were hijacked during the September 11th Terrorist Attacks. A. Two. B. Four. C. Seven. D. Forty-forty-five. Forty-five. Really? Forty-five planes? That's a lot of planes. How many-how-how would they get that many planes? They would crash into each other. Who wrote this? Let me write it next time. This is ridiculous. (looks at Craig the Devil) It's not that one. I'll tell you right now it's not that one.
Brooklyn Guy: How many people- man, these questions are sad. Okay, how many died during the Holocaust? A. Eleven million. B. Six million. C. Seventeen trillion, that seems kinda high. And D. Twelve. Twelve people. Twelve-yes-twelve people died in the Holocaust. Twelve. There's-there's more people in the audience tonight than died in the Holocaust. Yeah sure, yeah that makes sense. Yeah okay, twelve people. Twelve peo-Twelve people would even be that big of a deal. Twelve people would be-it would barely make the paper, maybe a local paper, like, in a small box on the bottom. But-but that's pretty much it. Ugh. (whispers) Goddammit. (speaks loudly) Who is writing these? Who is-who is actually writing these? Is it Kevin? I bet it's Kevin that stupid bastard. I bet it's him, I bet money it's him. That's coming out of your paycheck if he gets this right. It is. Yeah, you.
In Bowser Junior's 1st Grade!, one of the class's teachers is a pedophile who is implied to have molested Cody in the bathroom during lunch.
Bubbles is a convicted serial rapist. When he appears in the Summer School arc, he escapes his cuffs, runs away, then runs back to the classroom and grabs Pixie Goblin before running again. When Pixie Goblin shows up again, he says he doesn't want to talk about what happened and sobs. Later, in the same episode, it's show and tell, and during Pixie Goblin's show and tell he tries to show his sword. Officer Goodman mistakes it for a real weapon and doesn't realize it's sewn to his hand, resulting in Pixie Goblin being reunited with Bubbles.
Bubbles:(grabs Pixie Goblin with a crazed smile) Ready for round two?!
Chef PeePee calls the number for the Crocodile Hunter, only to be informed that Steve Irwin died due to a stingray attack. He notes that weird because he wasn't the "Stingray Hunter". In reality, Steve Irwin is the name of a man known as the Crocodile Hunter who did die from a stingray attack.
Craig the Devil notes his dogs are barking, unlike Michael Vick's.
The Bowser Junior's Playtime videos and the Thanksgiving Playtime Special shown in the 2014 Thanksgiving Episode.
Junior is an alcoholic who beats his wife, berates his daughter and wife, tried to abort his daughter's pregnancy by attacking her, didn't care when his wife was cooking his daughter, and even sleeps with his secretary.
Joseph plays the wife who regularly argues, screams, and cries with the anger directed at Jr. She is apparently sleeping with a Hispanic man, and even admits to not wanting his own daughter.
Cody plays "Sally" the daughter who is in love with a man named "Ken" who got her prematurely pregnant. She also apparently still wears diapers at her age, and is forced to witness her mother and father's constant bickering and yelling, and has been told by them that neither actually love her. It's a good thing this is pretend House.
You know it's a TomSka sketch when the punchline is death.
Welcome to Night Vale relies a lot on this, with Cecil describing the violent, unpredictable outcomes of the the events in town with a calm, relaxed and even sometimes bored-sounding tone, not to mention the casualness with which he dismisses interns that fall in the line of duty.
Cecil: To the friends and family of Intern Maureen, etc., etc.
The Scathing Atheist gets into this a lot, but this comes about when discussing religious harms, such as religious groups stoning women, or when the hosts bring up the orthodox Jewish practice of metzitzah b'peh, where mohels will circumcise children and then suck the penis to remove blood, often leading to the spread of STDs among infants.
One time they brought on the Cognitive Dissonance podcast to make jokes about the recent Planned Parenthood controversy, and came up with a list of ideas for "Ideas for the after-market retailer".
Heath: Here's the problem with early term abortions, the fetuses just don't have enough skin yet. You can stretch it out, I guess, but that's good enough for only one lampshade.
The entirety of the humor found in Kakos Industries is derived from pain, humiliation, and extreme vulgarity. This is a show about an Evil, Inc., after all.
A certain person has made a comment about genocide as a result of his personal distaste of anime. It did get some smiles, but still... he said that two nukes weren't enough....
Special mention goes to Episode 84, where there is a countdown of 10 jokes, which starts from Crossing The Line Twice and then crawls into a black hole halfway through the countdown.
The darker jokes are exaggerated in Episode 87, especially when Taylor Swift crashes her car.
"This is no time to do your Tim Horton impression!"
And now, introducing Episode 89, the black hole of possibly the entire season, if not series. The top 10 joke countdown from Episode 84 comes back here and it starts with honorable mentions before the black hole of the jokes turn into pitch black.
Number one: "Get in the box...or it's back in the hole for you." Not helping is the Death Glare he gives while saying that line.
Season Five has come out and the 113th episode may be the darkest episode of the entire series by far. The countdown from Episode 84 is here and this time there are 20 jokes, this time about suicide.
"If you can't laugh at suicide, then the terrorists win...and the Titanic was an inside job."
Let's just say season five is season four up to eleven.
This site has a list of medical slang. Most them are jokes about terminal diseases, wounds, deformities, etc.
There was once an app called Baby Shaker, where one would shake their phone to make a picture of a baby stop crying and the picture of the infant would have X eyes to indicate that the shaking killed the baby. Mass backlash to the app's tasteless premise led to the app being immediately delisted.
True Capitalist Radio was turned into this by the trolls who call in. The Radio Graffiti and Shout Outs segments are filled with absolutely horrible references to various tragedies as well as sexually and morally deviant behavior, all designed to enrage our Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist host.
Dragon Ball Z Abridged has a fair bit of this, although used somewhat conservatively. A few highlights:
The reveal that Yamcha killed himself in the future timeline. Even worse, a Deleted Scene revealed that he used Puar as the rope.
The death of baby Cell being turned into an abortion metaphor, and Krillin giving it a Lampshade Hanging.
Chi-Chi reading the disclaimer while Goku screams in agony in the background.
Cell coughing up a pacifier and complaining about it coming out of the wrong hole.
Goku accidentally implying that he beats his wife during the Cell Games.
Pro and Noob: In Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate, Cotton likes to show off the more ridiculous weapons. This is what happened with the Kut-Ku Cutters, which is two tiny Yian Kut-Ku heads on sticks.
Josh: So you slaughtered two baby Kut-Ku, took their bone, grafted it to their heads, then ripped off their feet, stuck it to the bone, so you can have both weapon and ornament.
World War II: Indy's usually sober commentary on the war sometimes breaks into this when particularly outlandish historical incidents crop up. Such as the journey of French general Maxime Weygand in May 1940 to organize a counterattack against the German invasion being described by Indy as descending into the realm of farce. A complicated shuffle around France and Belgium, involving Belgian King Leopold III, a stop at a country inn for an omelet, a perceived snub by a fellow commander, and a major army group left without anyone in charge in this time of major crisis needs a sidebar graphic to be made sense of.
Adult Wednesday Addams takes the dark humor that The Addams Family is renowned for and applies it to LA in The New '10s. Wednesday is arguably darker than ever but, as per usual, is never actually shown hurting anyone (at least not physically).
Bob Chipman, aka Movie Bob, dissects this trope during a rather vicious commentary on Louis CK. (Louis changed his routine to "angry older man rants about the kids being too soft" after being accused of sexual assault.) To wit, great "shock comedy" is about being able to bring the taboo out as a part of a joke and risk the joke flopping, yet still deliver humor that worked despite violating the taboo. The greats would do it while speaking truth to power at the same time. He brings up comedians like George Carlin and Lenny Bruce as examples.
Lindsey Ellis does something similar in a long dissection of Mel Brooks and black comedy in the context of The Producers. Specifically, good black comedy has intent and thought, and it robs the thing mocked (in Brooks' case, often heavy topics like racism, Nazis, and Hitler) of any dignity, preventing a Misaimed Fandom. That is what makes good black comedy thoughtful and powerful, as opposed to mere shock for the sake of shock.
This is why Brooks' fans and defenders enjoy things like Blazing Saddles despite all the racial slurs dropped. The movie skewers and mocks the white racists and they are shown to be pathetic and stupid. Their arguments can't stand up to ridicule and their beliefs don't deserve to be treated with dignity. However, even Brooks' fans are often uncomfortable with his simply mean-spirited jokes at the expense of homosexuals, where the comedy isn't taking shots at the powerful to defend the oppressed.
ML Lanzillotta's videos often involve dark or disturbing jokes. One especially notable example would be the video in which Lanzillotta describes her "hilarious childhood suicide attempts" (there were quite a few, apparently).
Farce of the Three Kingdoms mainly runs on black comedy - inevitable, given that the novel that it satirizes is about decades of bloody civil war. Highlights include the Running Gag in which minor characters try to one-up each other for the most dramatic death scene.
Shipwrecked Comedy's "Bertha's Attic Song" is about all the things Bertha Rochester does to kill time in her attic, including setting fires, making voodoo dolls and crying.
"[Sugar plantations in the Caribbean] are so goddamn profitable, you might forget to not do slavery."
"'I know! Let's rape Africa!' said Europe, scrambling to see who could rape it the fastest."
"Britain and France are still hungry."
"Germany's back, featuring Hitler the angry moustache model! And he's mad at the Jews for existing."
"The Aztec and Inca empires are off to a good start. Wonder if they know that Europe just discovered their continent... And Spain realised that this is not India, but they pillaged it anyway. 'Damn,' said Britain and France. 'We gotta start pillaging some stuff.'"
Screen Rant Pitch Meetings: The pitch meeting for A Quiet Place, which was uploaded on March 28, 2020, while people were quarantining themselves in their homes during the coronavirus outbreak. The Screenwriter then talks about how the year is 2020, and how city streets are deserted 89 days after the alien attack.
Producer: Oh, wow, completely empty streets in 2020. Can you imagine? Screenwriter: I know. It's crazy, right?
Veterans for Peace UK made a video titled "Action Man: Battlefield Casualties" to satirize the British army's policy of recruiting 16-year-olds via Parody Commercials for Action Man figures that represented the unpleasant consequences of enlisting in the military at a young age, albeit played for very dark humor, especially due to the kids in the faux commercials still expressing the same joy children typically express when shown playing with the product in toy commercials.
PTSD Action Man, who comes with Thousand-Yard Stare action and ends up "escaping" the trauma his time in the military gave him by hanging himself.
Paralysed Action Man, who is permanently wheelchair-bound as a result of his spine being shattered, has to use a colostomy bag and is stuck struggling to stack cans at a grocery store because his benefits were cancelled.
Dead Action Man, who is shown reduced to a bloody, limb-less corpse after being blown up by bombs, is said to have died at the age of 19 when his remains are observed by a coroner, receives a posthumous medal for his bravery and has his funeral acted out by the two children playing with the figure.
Reddit has the Herman Cain Awards, a subreddit dedicated to mocking those who have expressed anti-mask, anti-vax, or Covid-hoax views...and were subsequently hospitalized or died from the disease. Rather obviously, a lot of very dark jokes and nicknames have come up. Among the more notable ones:
Freedom tube - endotracheal tube
Horse paste - ivermectin
Candeath Owens - Candace Owens
The Cheeky Moon sketch "Emergency First Aid Hacks with Rach" starts out like a regular YouTube cooking video, with the perky host talking about how to make snacks for movie night, but then she reveals that her brother choked on a nacho chip earlier and it morphs into her equally perky and largely clueless attempts to revive him, in which she goes full fangirl on her first aid kit and has a quick clip of her untalented musician friend Dylan performing "Bring Me To Life" by Evanescence because whereas she would have liked to use "Stayin' Alive" by The Bee Gees, copyright issues meant that that version of the video was muted. She eventually manages to save her brother's life. It then goes into full Tear Jerker territory by showing the story of a man in his home watching that video on YouTube for first aid hacks to save his wife, but because the video is so crap, she dies. Three months later his life is a complete mess, and he narrowly escapes death by choking himself only because he slips on the garbage on his floor and the blockage is expelled from his throat. He cleans himself up and gets his life back together and meets someone new, and she asks him if he wants to watch Bedazzled or Lawrence of Arabia. He can't make up his mind, so he looks up film reviews on the internet... and finds a YouTuber about to review the latter film with some friends, who include the original host and her brother, who can be seen in the background, with him starting to choke on a nacho.
After the loss of the Titan submersible, darkly humorous comments started being posted in the reviews of the Sci-Fi Horror game Iron Lung. Some highlights:
Q: What's the difference between Iron Lung and the Titanic sub? A: Replayability
Play this game with a Logitech F710 controller for an extra challenge
My favorite Oceangate experience!
I played this with a Logitech F710 and with 3 of my rich buddies for full immersion.
Quite common in Mom Can't Cook!, as most of the protagonists of the films they discuss are kids and the hosts like to imagine awful things happening to them as a result of adults' incompetence or the weird supernatural stuff that happens in a lot of them.
◊ of Irony consists of a sign saying that a World War I memorial was damaged during World War II.
