I was recently reflecting on how much I enjoy dark humor. The closer it comes to being really offensive, the more I like it - but ONLY if it is truly funny also. It’s not enough to simply be offensive.
Here are the best examples or instances I can think of:
**Sam Kinison’s comedy routine about homosexual necrophilia.
John Cleese eulogizing Graham Chapman a’ la the “Dead Parrot Sketch”.
Michael Moore once organized a group of laryngectomy victims to sing Christmas carrols with their electronic voiceboxes at the headquarters of major tobacco companies.
The stuttering scene in “A Fish Called Wanda”.
**
Let’s have your examples, but be careful of being too detailed, as we’re not in the Pit.
There was a Kids in the Hall sketch, I forget what year. Dave Foley is sitting in a golf course clubhouse having a drink and Kevin McDonald comes in from his round. Dave asks him how it went and they exchange pleasant small talk.
“Do you play?” Kevin asks.
“Oh, God no.” Says Dave. “I hate the game. Hate people that play it even more.”
Along the same lines of Sam Kinison’s act, when he’d find the guy with the worst/best betrayal by their gf/wife, and then calling them up and basically watching Kinison go off on them.
The organ donor skit from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.
My friend was filling me in on the latest conspiracy theory he’d heard about Princess Di’s death. He said that the paparazzi were actually Mossad agents trying to dig up dirt on her and discredit her anti-landmine campaigns. They had just been trying to get photos of her drunk, but accidentally caused the crash.
He finished it with “they just wanted to smear her.”
My immediate reply: “they did.”
It took him a few minutes to reply to that. Mainly to stop choking on his drink.
My personal favorite from Kids in the Hall:
David Foley as Drunk Dad: “Son, I have a surprise for you. I bought you a puppy today. But then on the way home from work, I got hungry, and I ate it. Oh come on, stop crying, I’m just kidding with you. You know I’d never buy you a puppy.”
The end of the very first Buffy, where the principal explains that the kids who died didn’t learn a very good lesson today about safety, but the rest of us did.
Most of Andy Kaufman’s routines. I particularly liked the one in which he gets into it with a drunken heckler. Another guy in the audience was ready to take on the “drunk” by the time it was over.
