Black Comedy / Western Animation

• A few of the in-house Cartoon Network [adult swim] shows lightly qualify. "Lightly" because more often, they're just flat-out insane.
  • Like veal. Only babies.
  • Almost every one of the The New Adventures of the Wonder Twins shorts has someone dying due to the twins' inability to use their powers correctly.
• Adventure Time has a surprising amount of this, and Wikipedia even lists it as a Black Comedy. A few outstanding examples:
  • The episode "Princess Monster Wife" is about The Ice King stealing body parts of other princesses to create his own princess. His own fully aware princess. She's so horrifying that Finn and Jake faint at the sight of her, and she knows that she's an unnatural and suffers horrible emotional trauma by merely existing and knowing she's an abomination, while the Ice King only tries to comfort her with some of his only displays of kindness in the whole series only for Finn and Jake to screw it up by not understanding the situation or that she's fully aware. And it's somehow as hilarious as it is heartwrenching, partially thanks to the simplistic and childish art style that the show deploys.
  • The Christmas Special "Holly Jolly Secrets" established that The Ice King was once a normal antiquarian who stumbled upon an Artifact of Doom that drove him insane and away from his fiancee Betty and he lives through the apocalypse crying out for his lost love and begging that anyone forgive him for whatever he may do under the influence of his evil crown. After The Reveal, Jake's first line is "Drama boooomb!!!", and the Ice King cries out about his secret being revealed; that secret being that he "used to wear glasses", and he continues to brush off everything that happened, along with everyone else besides Finn. Even not considering The Reveal, the entire two part episode consisted of Finn and Jake watching The Ice King's video diary, which was filled to the brim with Cringe Comedy and The Ice King sobbing for hours about his unhappiness. It's all darkly funny, until the depressing ending.
  • One of the tamer examples: In one episode Jake is imprisoned by a Demon who weakens him by stealing Jake's blood and supplies him with various things he might need, albeit surrounded by a force-field that is rigged to vaporize him. He has a rather careless attitude towards the whole situation and takes a seat on what he believes to be a rock. It turns out to be a member of turtle-like species that apparently spends the first twelve years of its lifetime sleeping. it eventually approaches the supplies and cheerfully exclaims "I just woke up today!" before being obliterated by a quick and powerful zap. Jake picks up the shell and decides to pretend it's sleeping. The show in general is getting much Darker and Edgier.
• The Amazing World of Gumball:
  • One episode revolves around the two protagonists delivering pizzas. Two anthropomorphic pizzas answer the door, considering the pizza to be their new baby. Gumball accidentally drops the pizza as the father◊ is paying him.
  • A later episode revolves around one of the recurring characters who meets a gruesome demise in nearly every appearance, with the two protagonists trying to figure out how he's able to return. To do this they kill him in a montage of different fatalities, only for him to come back from each one. (It turns out that his parents clone him.)
  • There are also a number of jokes revolving around Animate Inanimate Object characters being maimed in ways that befit what they are, such as in "The Coach", when a flashback shows that Jamie has in the past eaten bits of Sarah (an ice cream cone) and Banana Joe, torn off Teri (a girl made of paper)'s leg, then chewed it up and spit it at her, and fed Anton (a piece of toast) to a group of ducks.
  • "The Question" is full of this, from an Armor-Piercing Question causing Larry to go totally insane and possibly kill himself, to the ghost of a skydiver chasing Gumball and Darwin only for his parachute to deploy and send him flying backwards at which point he says "Oh, now you work", to the Solar System singing a cheerful and upbeat song about how your life is ultimately meaningless.
  • "The Parents" has Nicole mentioning off-hand that her parents almost killed her by attempting to get her an A+ blood transfusion when her blood type is B-.
  • “The Copycats” has the Wattersons attempt to get rid of their knockoffs^note who come from a real show called Miracle Star, which unashamedly copies Gumball by attempting all sorts of dangerous stunts in hopes that their ripoffs will kill themselves trying to copy them; Gumball replaces his alarm clock with a time bomb, Darwin blindfolds himself while choosing between milk and a biohazard, Nicole drives as recklessly as possible, and Richard outright chains himself up for a bath and disposes of the key. He also donates a kidney, only to find out that his copycat is the one who received it. In the end, the Wattersons drive a truck with a leaky tank leaving a trail lit by fire after nothing else works. While the Wattersons manage to stop before falling off the freeway thanks to Anais, the copycats don’t have an equivalent to Anais and the results aren’t pretty.
    Gumball (to the copycats): Are you guys good?!
    Chi Chi (severely injured): No…
    Gumball: Eh, good enough.
  • Gumball by the fifth season has so much dark humor and relentless satire that it can be described as South Park for kids.
• In the American Dad! episode "Tearjerker", the evil plot involves a film about a mentally retarded, alcoholic Jew in the Holocaust with a cancer-riddled puppy.
• In Aqua Teen Hunger Force, awful things are always happening to the neighbour, Carl. He has 'died' many times on the show, including; his arms being ripped off, his skin being torn off (and then shot with robot lasers), being blasted with laser guided socks by robotic turkeys, and and being sucked into a turbine powered toilet (with only his head left intact), after which he was revived in various ways. His penis has also been surgically removed, he's been raped by dogs, was hypnotised and then forced to shove and entire broomstick into his body by way of his anus, and other various assaults. One of the main characters, Shake, has also attempted suicide many times (succeeding a few times, and once by accident), including; putting a hose on the exhaust pipe of Carl's car and feeding it into the interior with the windows rolled up, hanging himself (which was thwarted by Frylock, but then doing it right in Carl's pool with piranhas, sleeping pills, and another hose attached to Carl's car exhaust), cutting himself in half with a katana (the accidental one), and finally, attempting to shoot himself in the head, only to be patched up by the Marines so he could report for duty. Standards and Practices: Acceptable!
• Beavis and Butt-Head: Beavis and Butthead often hurt themselves in pretty gruesome ways. "Woodshop" has them destroying all the equipment in their classroom. Then Beavis cuts his finger off, because he just felt like touching the saw! Cue the panicking teacher being unable to find his first-aid kit and telephone, because the two boys had destroyed everything that could help Beavis in this particular emergency situation.
• Bluey:
  • A Lighter and Softer variant, but the playtime shenanigans sometimes enact scenarios invoking this kind of humor. Examples include Bluey and Bingo, as the "grannies" Janet and Rita, "hitting" others while driving in a toy car, Lucky's dad getting attacked by Chilli and Bingo ("hypnotized" to believe they're lions by a magic asparagus), and a classmate unknowingly exposing an "early baby" doll to Bluey and her friends' collective horror.
  • The second season continues the trend. "Janet and Rita" sabotage the titular 'Bus' and attack the driver at the story's conclusion, and 'The Show' gets very awkward when the balloon used to represent Bingo-as-Chilli pregnant with Bluey suddenly pops.
  • 'Mum School' sees Bluey corralling her brood of balloon children by hitting them with a wrapper paper roll and confining the least manageable to a laundry basket cage.
  • In "Bumpy and the Wise Old Wolfhound", the Baker Lady (played by Muffin) says that she was sick with rabies in the past week, which is a fatal disease for dogs. However, Bingo's nurse and Chilli, who are watching the video with Bingo at the hospital, laugh at this because of Muffin's amateur acting.
• The very first episode of Bob's Burgers jokes about cannibalism (the restaurant comes under fire from Louise's rumor they serve human meat from the mortician's next door) and pedophilia (Louise's "Child Molester Burger" that comes with free candy).
• BoJack Horseman. In spades. At least one off-colour joke per episode. Special mention has to go to BoJack having sex with his TV daughter and, in a later episode, his roommate Todd witnessing a shanking in prison after being informed he'll be "just fine" by the victim.
  • The series' constant down-to-earth depiction of everyday misery, clinical depression, and consumerism in an increasingly spiritual empty world, coupled with its use of philosophical Kafka Komedy can get like this when coupled with the normal absurdism of Hollywoo.
  • The series finale of Horsin' Around apparently has BoJack's character dying of a broken heart due to his three adopted orphans not appreciating him enough, who are in turn handed over to child protective services.
    BoJack: We might've gone too dark on that series finale.
  • Most, if not all, of BoJack's flashbacks to his Hilariously Abusive Childhood:
    Beatrice Horseman: (dryly) Here's your omelet. (throws it on the table) I'm sorry it's not as good as the omelets your secretary makes, but then you're not married to your secretary, are you?
    Butterscotch Horseman: (bitterly) Well, maybe if my secretary also refused to get an abortion, I would be!
    (camera pans to reveal a young BoJack sitting at the table)
    Young BoJack: Mommy, can I have an omelet?
    Beatrice Horseman: You're the birthday boy.
  • The many, many examples of Bloody Hilarious in the series. Overdrawn at the Blood Bank doesn't even begin to cover it.
  • Any mention of Sarah Lynn's family life (especially her Stage Mom with Casting Couch tendencies and her "stepfather") is loaded with Gallows Humor, at least until the end.
  • The meat industry/competition between Chicken 4 Days and Gentle Farms and its explanation In-Universe. Carnivore Confusion indeed!
  • The dinner party for Mr. Peanutbutter's governor campaign in season 4. Poor Zach Braff. May his meat have pleased those starving.
• The Boondocks often plays racial stereotypes and violent crimes for laughs.
• Cartoon Network's Cartoons That Never Made It adverts consisted of shorts about fictional cartoons that never made it past the pilot due to having terrible premises, with most of the shorts' premises revolving around a morbid joke that is juxtaposed with an incongruously upbeat theme song.
  • "Rupert the Grouper" is about a dancing grouper who ends up dying from being out of his fishbowl too long by the time the title sequence ends. The actual episode is just a brief clip of people dancing around his corpse and his body is shown starting to smell and attracting flies during the end credits.
  • "Frothy Dawg" stars a manically grinning rabid dog who won't stop biting people who get too close to him and in one shot is shown to have infected a bat, a squirrel, a raccoon and a monkey with his disease (all of whom are shown smiling with him as if they're friends hanging out who don't mind that they're all afflicted by an infection that has drastically reduced their lifespans). The end of the title sequence also shows that it is the series' seventh episode, alluding to how dogs infected with rabies typically die within a week when they are not treated in time.
  • "Salt 'n' Slug" is about a sentient salt shaker and a slug being in love, with the salt shaker inevitably ending up killing the slug and reducing her to a pile of ash.
• CatDog. It's not obvious at first glance, but Word of God is that the series is fundamentally about conjoined brothers with the most miserable lives imaginable in the most miserable setting possible - and it's a comedy for children!
• Most of the humor in Celebrity Deathmatch (where, as the name suggests, celebrities compete in a Deadly Game) is either this or Gallows Humor.
• Much of the humor in Clone High comes from its facetious treatment of issues usually presented seriously on teen dramas (e.g. drug abuse, discrimination, death) as well as some jokes about the fates of the historical figures the characters are cloned from (such as Marie Curie's clone being a misshapen mutant because of her genetic source's death by radiation poisoning and John F. Kennedy's clone gloating that nothing bad ever happens to the Kennedys, obliviously disregarding that JFK is a President most well-known for being assassinated).
• Courage the Cowardly Dog: Courage and his owners, Eustace and Muriel Bagge, constantly run into monsters, aliens, demons, mad scientists, zombies, and island natives that Courage must fend off to save his owners. Eustace always ends up being attacked by all the horrors in the series.
• Dan Vs. is about a completely desensitized, immoral, rude, stubborn, selfish, heartless asshole who will put people (including his friends) in harm's way to commit (usually illegal) acts of vengeance, and yet is so hilarious.
• A large amount of humor in Dawn of the Croods revolves around how short life expectancy is for cavemen. The valley the Croods live in is called "Ahhh! Valley" because those were the last words of the first person to discover the valley, as he didn't check to make sure there wasn't any dangerous animals living there.
• Dinosaur Train has this for the audience, with the characters blissfully unaware. In "Zeppelin: Crater", the Pterosaur family and Mr. Conductor visit a crater that may have been created by an asteroid. They discuss the idea of something like that happening again. Mr. Conductor says his mother told him that something like that is very rare and not something to worry about. Buddy comments "I mean, what are the odds an asteroid would ever hit us?"
• And, what black humor list would be complete without mention of Drawn Together? The show definitely goes out of its way to be controversial and gross, though some jokes can be seen as pretty tasteless.
  • Perhaps the best example of something on the show being both dark and hilarious is in "Little Orphan Hero" in which Captain Hero ends up reenacting the rape scene from The Accused. It doesn't sound funny until you consider the fact that A: He's dressed like a woman for no good reason and no one at the frat kegger questions this; B: He's powerful and crazy enough to kill all his attackers with ease; C: A newspaper headline later in the show reads "Best Kegger Ever!", and D: It's a Superman Expy in a tube top being gang banged by frat boys. The sheer insanity of the situation counteracts the otherwise offensive nature of the joke.
  • From the same episode: Captain Hero wipes out his species out of spite.
  Captain Hero: Captain Hero ONE! Billions of innocent Zebulonians... um... dead. Oh. I... uh... (Slinks off)
• Family Guy is a black hole; blackness so dense, not even light can escape. For example; "September Eleventh, Two Thousand Fun!" The show couples this brand of humor with Breathless Non Sequiturs. "Airport '07" applied the trope by featuring a sequence in which a group of "Prom Night Dumpster Babies" sing a showtune about their plight.
  • The episode "The Splendid Source" spoofed this; Peter and friends find the people who write the world's dirty jokes. They have on display the first dead baby joke, a papyrus scroll with an Egyptian woman saying "My baby is dead" and a man pointing and saying "Ha".
• The Fairly OddParents! does the occasional morbid joke.
  • "That's Life" has Timmy's wish for everything in his mother's garden to be full of life, causing his deceased pet gerbil Eddie (shown in a flashback to have starved to death because of Timmy's father neglecting it) to come back as a zombie that tries to kill Timmy's parents in retribution. In addition, when Timmy's mother cries that everything she touches dies, Timmy's dad tries to get their neighbors, the Dinklebergs, to touch his wife's hands.
  • "Knighty Knight" has a bit where King Arthur is reduced to a skeleton after trying to attack a dragon. Following an awkward pause, Timmy says "Uh, guys?" to his godparents, and Cosmo and Wanda proceed to use their magic to bring Arthur's charred remains back to life.
  • "Shelf Life" has Timmy change the word "villagers" in Frankenstein to "ill", which causes the mob of angry villagers to become very sick and bandaged. One girl ends up having her bandaged arm break off after she lifts it.
  • "Sooper Poof" has a couple of Not What It Looks Like gags where Timmy's parents catch him when it looks like he's about to drop Poof into a tank of sharks and is holding him too close to a meat-slicing doodad.
  • "Farm Pit" has a gag where it's implied Cosmo is dressed like Dorothy Gale because he took the clothes of a corpse he found at a crime scene.
• Futurama treats all the problems of living in a futuristic dystopia very humorously.
  • There's an episode where Bender adopts a dozen orphans and then attempts to sell them to a restaurant as meat once they become too expensive to care for. He hugs one to check their average weight, and when arrested by the police, one of his offenses is "misrepresenting the weight of livestock".
  • Then there's the second movie "The Beast With a Billion Backs" where in order for the Robot Devil to provide the robots with weapons he tells Bender he must give him his first born son, so he brings him to Robot Hell and casually kicks him into a vat of molten lead saying "Here you go". The Robot Devil notes that the act was brutal even for him, only for Bender to reply "No backsies".
  • In the same movie, Bender goes to kill himself in a suicide booth (itself a Running Gag example). He ends up falling through a trap door before it has a chance to work, and after it does, this happens.
  Recording: You are now dead. Please take your receipt.
  A receipt is printed out, falling onto a very large pile of untouched receipts.
  • There's also a number of jokes implying that cannibalism is legal in the future.
• The Galaxy High episode "The Beef Who Would Be King" has a dark joke where Doyle swats a fly that turns out to be a student at the high school, with Doyle's embarrassment at accidentally killing a student and Ms. McBrain's confusion at the student's absence being played for laughs.
• Gravity Falls uses this trope a lot for a Disney cartoon, even more so in Season 2. Examples would be Preston Northwest casually mentioning in "Northwest Mansion Mystery" about eating the butler if things go badly, or Bill Cipher giving Dipper a decapitated head that constantly screams as a present in "Sock Opera".
  • Bill seems to be fond of this trope, particularly when he is giving out "gifts" to people. What's one of the first things he does when he appears in "Dreamscaperers"? Rip out a deer's teeth and give them to the nine year old who summoned him of course!
    Bill Cipher: Deer teeth. For you, kid! HA HA HA HA HA!
    Gideon: AUGH! You're Insane!
    Bill Cipher: Sure I am, what's your point?
  • He also invokes this type of humor in both his AMA and in Dipper and Mabel's Guide to Mystery and Non-Stop Fun. Some highlights include his enjoyment of bending people's fingers backwards until they break, wanting to disassemble Time Baby's molecules in order to salt his margaritas, and several other things that would probably never be allowed on the actual show. The first thing Bill links to in him AMA is a video of a real rabbit decomposing.
  • R.I.P. Big Henry
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy
  Grim: [baby voice] Who's gonna get reaped? Who's gonna get reaped? You are! You are!
  Grim: Come on, Mandy. This should be fun... like watching a train wreck.
  Grim: Ahahaha! This is more fun than the French Revolution!
  Grim: Actually, I'm scheduled to see you next week, Mr. Teetermeyer!
  • ...And that's just one character.
• Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law features a fantastically hilarious joke of law firm boss juggling a baby with shotguns and live chainsaws. Though in all fairness, that baby was having a good time.
  • Then there's the episode where Phil runs for president and goes down a line of well-wishers. "Shake hand, kiss baby. Shake hand, kiss baby. Shake hand, kiss hand. Shake baby, kiss hand. Kiss hand, shake baby..."
• HouseBroken isn’t really the kind of show you’d expect this type of humor from, but they managed to sneak in plenty of jokes during its first season (Nibbles is implied to have killed her roommate and ate off his face in the first episode). Season Two was pretty much nothing but this with episodes like Who’s Obsessed, Who’s a Scaredy Cat, Who Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts, and Who’s Getting Up There.
• Invader Zim. in this show, Zim steals the organs of schoolchildren to make his own anatomy seem more human, Gaz torments a boy for weeks to coerce him into giving her his game console, Zim and Dib are slowly transformed into sentient bologna sausages, Zim sends little toy pigs back in time to cause accidents and injury to Dib, slowly crippling him until he dies on camera, Dib finds out Zim is allergic to water and spends an episode tormenting him with dripping water and water balloons, and Dib accidentally curses Gaz to taste nothing but pig, causing her to experience some pretty severe humiliation by the media. Not to mention the number of times the earth is DOOMED, the running gag that Dib really wants to dissect Zim, or the fact that the earth is polluted and humans are stupid. All of which are played for laughs.
• Jimmy Two-Shoes may be Lighter and Softer than its original concept, but the final product is still rife with cruel and violent Amusing Injuries and humiliation. How many other cartoons would have an Ax-Crazy Yandere's Stalker Shrine being Played for Laughs? Considering the show's supposed to take place in a cartoony version of Hell, it's oddly fitting.
• Justice League:
  • "Hereafter" deals with Vandal Savage and a Superman who was shot into the future. Savage recounts how he killed the entire Justice League and destroyed the solar system, at which point a depowered Superman beats him into the ground and raises up a rock.
    Superman: I should crush your skull.
    Savage: Go ahead, we both know it wouldn't work.
    [Beat; Superman gets up]
    Superman: What do we do now?
    Savage: Lunch?
  • In "The Once and Future Thing, Part Two: Time, Warped", the time-traveling villain Chronos punishes one of his henchmen (Chucko, a member of the Jokerz gang) for informing the Justice League by sending him approximately 65 million years into the past, exactly when the dinosaurs were killed in a mass extinction. This mook's fate is just too absurdly over-the-top to take seriously.
    Chronos: Do you know what killed the dinosaurs? Well, Chucko does.
• In mid-season 2 of The Legend of Korra , there’s a two-part Whole Episode Flashback to the life of the first Avatar, Wan. When Wan learns firebending, he goes off to find another settlement and happens upon the ancestors of the Air Nomads. About 10,000 years after Wan’s time, the Fire Nation wipes out all but one airbender.
• The Madballs animated series' second episode "Gross Jokes" features some of this brand of humor.
  • The first sketch consists of Screamin' Meemie portraying an incompetent doctor named Dr. Ghastly, who ends up performing surgery on a patient when he isn't sure whether they've even been anesthetized and makes the assumption that the patient's problem is that they have an ugly thing inside their head, which turns out to be the patient's brain. At one point, Aargh remarks that Dr. Ghastly kills him, which results in Slobulus adding that Dr. Ghastly kills most of his patients.
  • Another skit in the episode has Aargh and Slobulus decide to visit their friend Skull Face in the cemetery. When Slobulus asks how they'll get to the cemetery, Aargh answers with "Easy, we'll just jump in front of a truck!"
• The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack lived and breathed off this trope by using Nightmare Fuel as comedy. An IMDB reviewer sums it up pretty well.
  This show is nightmare fuel, pure and simple. This 'nightmare fuel' aspect is, in no way, a negative view of the show. The backgrounds' dark and dreary art style seems to compliment the characters' lighthearted antics. Oftentimes, extreme reactions in the characters faces are grossly exaggerated in a vividly horrifying, and wildly entertaining, manner. The story lines, and even the setting, are twisted and sometimes hard to follow. Again, this is not detrimental to the show's entertainment value, but instead enhances it.
• Monkey Dust focuses on the darker side of life in Britain, 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 that some of the sketches were deemed to be too similar to recent events. It was revived for a third series, but the producer died soon afterward.
  • Perhaps the best of the lot is Ivan Dobsky, a man constantly committing murders so he can stay in prison, which he finds a lot nicer than the modern world.
  • The Paedofinder General skits, in which a man resembling a 16th-century witch hunter roams Britain accusing people of being "paedophiles" and executing them for trivial reasons.
    "By the powers invested in me by a text vote on Sky News, I find you guilty of paedophilia!"
• The Oblongs is loaded with morbid jokes, which is a given considering that the main characters are a lower-class family living in a community of people forced to endure horrific mutations and serious health problems because of the pollution coming from the upper crust who treat them like dirt.
• Rick and Morty has a very morbid sense of humor, with frequent subjects including trauma, sociopathy, alcoholism, and death. The show does a good job of balancing the humor and the darkness, so you can find a grim situation funny and yet still sympathize with the very realistically human reaction characters usually have to it (e.g. Rick pantsing Morty in front of two girls he was trying to impress and pushing him down the stairs is Played for Laughs, but Morty's humiliated crying afterwards is not).
• Rocko's Modern Life has more than its share of dark humor.
  • "Power Trip" begins with Really Really Big Man accidentally throwing his kid sidekick Jimmy into the sun.
  • "Spitballs" has a scene where a baseball player thinks he's caught the ball, but is horrified to find a severed head in his catcher's mitt.
  • In the beginning of "Rocko's Happy Sack", when Rocko finds that he's out of food, a starving insect comes across a single crumb. The insect happily declares "It's Thanksgiving!", only to fall over dead before he can start eating the crumb.
  • At one point in "Who's for Dinner?", Rocko excuses himself while having dinner with the Wolfes, who are anthropomorphic wolves as their surname implies (except for Heffer, who is a bovine). Rocko finds a closet full of little girls in red hoods with picnic baskets while trying to find the bathroom and later opens the bathroom mirror to find three pigs bound and gagged, each of them labeled with a day of the week.
  • The episode "Mama's Boy" has a Running Gag of Heffer's mother calling her son out of worry after he's started living on his own and Heffer exasperatedly telling his mother that he's just fine when he obviously isn't. The gag eventually escalates to Heffer lying to his mother that everything is alright while he's in jail, about to be executed, and in Hell.
  • In "Carnival Knowledge", Heffer tries to flip a frog from a wooden plank onto a lily pad using a hammer. He misses and accidentally hits the frog instead, killing it and splattering Slippy Slug, the carny, with green.
  • In "Flu-In-U-Enza", there’s a bluejay smoking in the waiting room who eventually coughs up his heart and dies.
• Robot Chicken lives and breathes this trope.
  • Almost inevitably, the show had one such sketch in which a crowd of visitors inside a maternity ward coo at a baby, and then a nurse walks up and covers its face to illustrate that it's dead. Good stuff.
  • Lampshaded in one episode where a sketch shows a visit from the Tooth Fairy being interrupted by the girl's mother and father arguing in an obvious abusive situation before a gunshot goes off, and showing Multiple Endings where some combination of the parents and the Tooth Fairy die. The characters in the sketch then win an award for "Darkest Sketch Ever". What makes this even darker is that you don't even see outside the room, just the poor child holding the covers in her room.
    • Ending 1: The Tooth Fairy wrestles the gun from the father, supposedly kills him, then walks back into the room and sits down with the kid before telling the child to be good and leaving the now orphaned child alone in her room.
    • Ending 2: The father kills the mother, and when the Tooth Fairy intervenes, kills her as well, then enters the child's room and tells the child that they're going on vacation to Disneyland. When the child asks if mom is coming, the father just repeats louder "Disney Land!!!"
    • Ending 3: The father kills the mother, and when the Tooth Fairy intervenes, kills her as well. The police arrive and you can see blinking blue and red lights through the girl's windows. The cops tell the father to drop the weapon, but he refuses, and supposedly gets shot to the ground, arrested, and taken away in a police car. The lights from the car go away, indicating the cops didn't know about the girl upstairs, leaving the child alone in a house with a dead tooth fairy and her dead mother while her father is carted off to jail. ...Until he and the Tooth Fairy come back in with a marching band, a hula girl, and a businessman who gives a large check to the kid over the aformentioned darkest sketch award.
  • In one sketch, Hannah Montana is murdered like John Lennon, and her friends from the show struggle to maintain the illusion of her being two different people with her corpse, Weekend at Bernie's-style, only for her body to become more horrifically mutilated. The sketch ends with a cut to Miley Cyrus crying hysterically in an office, as a Disney executive warns her "And THAT is how we'll end the show if you ever get knocked up like that Zoey 101 whore!"
  • 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.
  • They also like doing this to kids' shows a lot to give them darker jokes for a "Right In the Childhood" kind of blow. An example is the skit with Dora climbing a mountain and leaves Swiper to die in the cold (She hands him a gun to kill himself with, but purposely left it unloaded just to torment him further), Diego is dropped to his death from a mountain, she eats a small band of insects that started playing for her, and we even see the Grim Reaper come to claim Swiper as Swiper says "Reaper no Reaping" over and over.
  • One sketch has a little kid in a homemade costume playing Iron Man in his backyard when he sees the real Iron Man fly past overhead and, excited to see his hero in the flesh, runs after him to where Iron Man and the Avengers are fighting a giant mechanical crab monster. He accidentally distracts Iron Man, who gets smacked into the distance by the crab monster, and then is mistaken for the real Iron Man by Hulk and Giant Man, ending up with the kid being ricocheted around by the robot, shot by it, and falling into its engine, which actually succeeds in defeating it. Iron Man comes back and the other two realize what's happened, the last scene of the sketch being that the boy has been memorialized with a solid iron statue and Tony cracks a bad joke about it which the other Avengers groan at.
• The Simpsons occasionally uses this type of comedy. A couple of examples include a pregnant Brandine smoking a cigar, chugging a jug of moonshine, and proudly patting her belly, saying "That stopped the kicking". Another features Chief Wiggum in a flashback playing with a baby Ralph and dropping him on his head.
  • One well-known example occurs in "Homer's Enemy", where Frank Grimes—a man who has had bad luck all his life—accidentally electrocutes himself. Even during his funeral, Homer falls asleep, causing everybody to laugh as the coffin is lowered in the ground.
  • In the movie, Bart plays a game that involving blasting down babies. Maggie is not pleased... seemingly because Bart stole her game (she is implied to be playing the game later).
  • In the episode "Marge Gets a Job", on her first walkthrough of the Nuclear Power Plant, Marge notices some nameless employees each exhibiting some signs of work-related depression, each worse than the last to the point that one employee looks like he is ready to go on a shooting rampage. Marge, making quick note of this, suggests some quick ideas to liven things up, such as a day where the employees wear funny hats, and Tom Jones music plays in the background to lighten the mood. Mr. Burns immediately takes to this, and the next day, we see all of Marge's suggestions lumped into one, including "What's New, Pussycat?" piped over the intercom. The employees haven't gotten any better, with the one man grinning menacingly while patting his gun. As Mr. Burns obliviously exclaims "It's working!", we see him pump his gun and walk away from his desk.
  • There's also Moe Szyslak's repeated attempts to commit suicide.
  • The episode "Duffless" has Chief Wiggum mix up DOA (dead on arrival) and DWI (driving while intoxicated), much to Marge's initial shock when Wiggum tells her the former when informing her about Homer getting in trouble after a tour of the Duff brewery and awkwardness when a woman named Mrs. Phillips he told the latter shows up at the police station to pick her husband up.
• Solar Opposites has a lot of very dark and morbid jokes. The first three episodes alone include Yumyulack and Jesse pouring soda over a school bully's exposed brain to erase her memories of them shrinking and kidnapping her, a mock ad bumper that depicts the Shlorpians decorating a snowman with eyeballs and severed arms, Yumyulack saving Korvo's life by murdering who he later learns were actors Korvo hired to pretend to assassinate him, and Jesse's attempts to convince Yumyulack that he can befriend the humans who are Jerkasses resulting in the two finding themselves at a bar full of Neo-Nazis who all end up gruesomely slaughtered.
• South Park, most infamously. In its later seasons, it's even more notorious for rapidly switching between this and being too moralistic and heavy-handed. There were even dead babies during the Christopher Reeve stem cell episode. Some of the darkest episodes are:
  • "Stanley's Cup", where The Littlest Cancer Patient wants Stan and Kyle to win the hockey game for them. In a horrid subversion of this tired sports cliché, in the end they lose and so the child dies. The end!
  • The infamous "Scott Tenorman Must Die", where Cartman gets revenge after being tormented the whole episode by getting Scott's parents killed, chopping them up, putting their remains into a chili which he feeds to him, inviting his favorite band over just so they can mock him, and licking his tears as he cries his eyes out. It's Disproportionate Retribution taken to such a horrifying extreme that it's hilarious.
• SpongeBob SquarePants does this on occasion.
  Plankton: (holding a carton of baby powder) Is this made with real or artificial baby?
  • Heck, even before season 4 they did it on occasion. The season 2 episode The Fry Cook Games had a pole-vaulting event in which the competitors pole-vaulted over a vat of frying grease. Patrick bungles the whole thing, landing on the handle of the fryer, causing the grease to get launched into the crowd, turning an entire section into fish sticks. A fish promptly comes on-screen, ready with a sign, and begins selling them for $1 each.
  • At the beginning of the episode "Plankton's Pet", Plankton attempts to steal a Krabby Patty with a baby-like robot. Mr. Krabs tackles the thief, horrifying the customers and employees until he reveals the truth. However, when he puts the baby's head back on and kicks it out of the Krusty Krab, he is beaten by some women for his abuse.
  • "Nasty Patty", where SpongeBob and Mr Krabs think they have killed a health inspector and try to hide the body.
  • In "Demolition Doofus", Mrs. Puff and SpongeBob watch several injured fish attack each other in the hospital hallways, a doctor telling they were "risking their lives for their amusement". Mrs. Puff then has an Imagine Spot where SpongeBob is attacked from all sides by thugs in boats; when they clear up, all that remains of SpongeBob is his grave.
  • In "Code Yellow", SpongeBob performs surgery on Squidward by chopping him up with a spatula, causing him to squirt ink (in place of blood), accidentally pull out his heart, and chopping him up into sushi.
  • "Ghost Host" plays all sorts of insane Nightmare Fuel for laughs. One standout scene has the Flying Dutchman petting Gary and promising him that he’s not going to hurt him… and then eating him immediately afterward. SpongeBob, who sees the whole thing, is utterly horrified. Thankfully, it was just a trick and the real Gary shows up safe and sound only seconds later.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks: In "Envoys", during a disastrous asteroid simulation, the impact destroys the kindergarten on Deck 8 and the preschool is breached soon after, resulting in all the children on the ship being ejected into space.
• The Stick is a short about a man going to a therapist because he's afraid a boomerang that never came back to him will hit him at any moment. The short ends with him having overcome his anxiety and settled down. He's holding his newborn baby when all of a sudden the boomerang hits him and his baby falls out the window.
• For such a cheery, uplifting show, Steven Universe can have very dark humor at times.
  • "Steven and the Stevens" ends with Steven forming a rock band with the Crystal Gems and singing a song about the dangers of time-travel. Based on personal experience.
    We're Steven and the Crystal Gems
    Come on now, don't be shy
    I learned how to be true to myself
    By watching myself die!
  • In "Cat Fingers", Steven's attempt to master his Gem powers of Voluntary Shapeshifting lead to him being turned into a hideous amalgam of self-aware cat heads. When trying to convince his father to run him through the car wash to get rid of the cats, Steven cries out "I'M AN ADORABLE CAT MONSTER!"
  • After learning about Garnet's "Future Vision" in the episode of the same name, Steven has a series of cutesy chibi-style Imagine Spots about the various ways he could get killed, all while a jaunty ragtime piano song plays.
  • The episode "Keystone Motel" involves Steven and Garnet going along with Greg on a road trip, so Greg can buy a replacement brush for his car wash. He met the seller over the Internet, and nervously tells Steven that the seller might turn out to be an axe murderer:
    Greg: Well, I'm gonna go see a man about a tunnel brush... An Internet man. If I'm not back in an hour, call the police...
  • In "Log Date 7 15 2", Greg is working on the roof of the barn. Then Peridot simply walks up to him and shoves him off the roof, just to see if humans can fly.
  • "A Single Pale Rose" has Steven taking a Journey to the Center of the Mind in Pearl's gem, looking for her phone (It Makes Sense in Context), and encountering several decidedly uncomfortable memories.
    memory!Pearl: What was [Steven's mother Rose] thinking?! She can't have a baby!
    Steven: Well. This is awkward.
    [Later]
    Steven: [Making his way through the ruins of a battlefield] It better not turn out that her phone was in her pocket. Or she left it on the dresser or dropped it in the toilet. Seems about as likely as putting it away in your repressed war memories!
• The episode "Mr. Grumpypants" of Superjail! has Jailbot following Jacknife into a hospital and accidentally killing some sick kids; later on, various inmates of the prison are reverted into infants by magical means, which is a probably rare instance of seeing toddlers cutting each other to pieces. Also, the driving force of the episode is the Warden's hatred of children and desire to murder the little girl who Jailbot accidentally brought to Superjail. However, the inmates treat her with dignity, and the episode plays her death by cancer for drama.
• Toonsylvania, being a horror comedy cartoon, has its fair share of morbid jokes. Most examples are prevalent in the Night of the Living Fred segments, such as the Deadman family constantly falling apart due to being zombies, Fred Deadman dragging around his deceased pet dog Frisky and acting as if his pet was still alive, Dedgar Deadman implying that he and his family died from getting hit by a car and the episode "Bang!" ending with the entire neighborhood getting blown to Kingdom Come because Dedgar activated a bomb kept in his FBI agent neighbor's basement under the belief that he's being a good neighbor by helping him fix broken equipment.
• While not the first animated example that comes to mind for most, Total Drama definitely qualifies, especially as the series progressed. The show is hosted by a sadistic sociopath whose obsession with making the contestants' lives as painful and miserable as possible (and eagerness to see them die in his challenges) is entirely Played for Laughs, and many jokes involve characters both sympathetic and unsympathetic being harmed in over-the-top manners, cruelly humiliated, and/or potentially left for dead.
• The Transformers: Because the tone of the show changed after the events of The Transformers: The Movie, the third season is lacking in the traditional comedy and edges more into Black Comedy, sometimes going into full blown Gallows Humor. For example, a comedy episode in Season 2 has Gears get turned into an Extreme Doormat by the Decepticons, driving the latter crazy the entire time thanks to his Servile Snarker attitude. A comedy episode in Season 3 has the Decepticons attempting to cure Galvatron's insanity, playing the full gamut of psychiatric cures for comedy (including a lobotomy)—culminating in Galvatron destroying the medical planet and leaving its doctors at the mercy of their insane patients. Yikes.
• The Venture Bros. frequently gets laughs from graphic violence and horrible things and sheer sadism toward the main characters. This is the show with an episode that gave us a Lotus-Eater Machine Powered by a Forsaken Child, after all (even if Dr. Venture "didn't use the whole thing!") Also think about the fact that Dean and Hank are clones that are constantly being killed (at least for the first few seasons).
• What It's Like Being Alone, an obscure and short-lived Canadian show about a group of deformed orphans trying to get adopted (and failing), has this in spades. One critic described the show as having Addams Family values. If the character descriptions and premise don't tip you off on that, this quote might give you a good idea of what they were aiming for.
  Brad Peyton: These characters suffer only briefly- they don't want to wallow in it, they want to have fun. And if I can drop a giant pair of scissors through an orphan's head and cause people to laugh, then I've done my small part for public broadcasting.
• Wander over Yonder: In "The Axe", Commander Peepers has a Good-Times Montage as he prepares to leave the Skullship. Since he's the friend and second-in command to Card-Carrying Villain Lord Hater, the things they've bonded over are things like torturing prisoners, blowing up planets and playing in a pit of bones.

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