Here lies _enter name_, he was just dying to get to this cemetary on time as in life, he was usually late.

Poor crash, now we will have to change his nick name to splat.

We won’t have to wait for the witching hour as she was always a witch.

I hope he didn’t get reincarnated as a fly, I just killed him again as well as 10 of his best buddies with a rolled up newspaper.

With all of his coughing, he ended up in a coffin.

Mommy, I see dead people…..

It is either hot in here or somebody has gone the wrong way.

Hey Harry, go toward the light – no no don’t turn it off. This is NOT the time to conserve energy!

If you know the British comedy group “Monty Python” it will help tremendously in understanding this. When one of the members (Graham Chapman) died quite a few years ago another member (John Cleese) was asked to deliver the eulogy. Instead of talking about the usual stuff during eulogies, Cleese chose to do a “Monty Python” type of eulogy for his deceased friend. It began with “good riddance to the free-loading bastard”, and included bits from one of their most famous sketches (“The Dead Parrot Sketch” that Graham Chapman co-wrote). Cleese named off a dozen or so phrases to indicate Chapman was dead (kicked the bucket, bought the farm, pushing up daisies, etc., from the Dead Parrot sketch). It was shocking and unexpected but everyone knew that Chapman would’ve loved it and they laughed in tribute to him.

Black comedy, also known as black humour is a sub-genre of comedy and satire where topics and events that are usually treated seriously — death, mass murder, suicide, domestic abuse, sickness, madness, fear, drug abuse, rape, war, terrorism etc. — are treated in a humorous or satirical manner. Synonyms include dark humor, morbid humour, gallows humour and off-color humour.

Humor is a social tool that is often used to ease and diffuse tense situations. By laughing at problems a person can ease stress and other painful emotions.

Black comedy should be contrasted with obscenity, though the two are interrelated. In obscene humour, much of the humorous element comes from shock and revulsion; black comedy usually includes an element of irony, or even fatalism. This particular brand of humor can be exemplified by a scene in the play Waiting for Godot: A man takes off his belt to hang himself, and his trousers fall down.

In America, black comedy as a literary genre came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. Writers such as Terry Southern, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Harlan Ellison and Eric Nicol have written and published novels, stories and plays where profound or horrific events were portrayed in a comic manner. An anthology edited by Bruce Jay Friedman, titled “Black Humour,” assembles many examples of the genre.

The 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb presents one of the best-known examples of black comedy. The subject of the film is nuclear war and the extinction of life on Earth. Normally, dramas about nuclear war treat the subject with gravity and seriousness, creating suspense over the efforts to avoid a nuclear war. But Dr. Strangelove plays the subject for laughs; for example, in the film, the fail-safe procedures designed to prevent a nuclear war are precisely the systems that ensure that it will happen. The film Fail Safe, produced simultaneously, tells a largely identical story with a distinctly grave tone; the film The Bed-Sitting Room, released six years later, treats post-nuclear English society in an even wilder comic approach.

Today, black comedy can be found in almost all forms of media.

[edit] See also

Crude humor

Gallows humor

Macabre

Problem plays

Black Comedy, a play by Peter Shaffer

Disambiguation—–

Now that you know where you are going, you’d better get started. Surely you didn’t learn only today that this assignment is due tomorrow.

Light as a feather, stiff as a board….literally

I’m sorry, you’re dead…

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

Cardboard is stiff,

And so are you.

try googling it