There’s a bizarre, controversial book I read a few years ago, A Man Lies Dreaming. I’ll write the rest in spoilers:
[spoiler]It’s an alt-history in which Germany is overrun by Soviet troops before the Third Reich completely takes over. Adolf Hitler flees to England, where he starts a second career as a down-on-his-luck private eye. He’s hired by a gorgeous Jewish woman into violent sexual domination, and the book has scene after scene of his sexual humiliation both at her hands and at the hands of her gangster dad. It’s pulpy and lowbrow to the extreme.
That’s most of the book. It’s interspersed with scenes of a Jewish pulp writer wasting away in a concentration camp, and as the book continues, you realize that the main story is the fantasy he tells himself to survive as long as he can.[/spoiler]
That’s some serious dark humor.
The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman by Louis de Bernières … several times during the reading, I had to put the book down after a description of the very worst, vilest and horrible of inhumanities and ask myself why I was laughing so hard … it takes true comic genius to make funny jokes about …
Spoiled as NSFW, NSFH, NSFS and NSAAS
[spoiler]Two Click Rule:
… drowning all the town’s orphan children …
[/spoiler]
That’s actually quite mild compared to the jokes I wouldn’t dare post here …
Animal House really isn’t a dark comedy, the OP is really flawed. Using bigoted jokes that fall flat now but didn’t then really doesn’t put a movie into that category.
To me, it sounds like a book I want to hear about but not read, or something I’d like as a short story. If it’s an actual novel length book and I didn’t know the twist, I can’t see slogging through pulpy BDSM eroitca about Hitler long enough to get to the ‘twist’ part. Also there’s a decent chance that the author set their ‘I’m going to write about stuff so horrible no one could be into it’ bar lower than my ‘this is erotica I’ll read for fun’ or ‘this is something that me or people I know are actually into’ bars, which would make it into just plain Hitler erotica for me, which is REALLY not something I desire to read.
I guess it would depend on the quality of the writing. I don’t enjoy subversive for its own sake, usually, but I’ve seen shocking and terrible used pretty artistically.
One title I was going to mention was World’s Best Dad, a dark comedy with Robin Williams. He’s struggling to raise a little dickhead of a son, and then,
The son accidentally hangs himself while masturbating. The father is overcome with grief, but in his attempt to paint the boy in a better light, he fakes the death as a suicide, even penning his own made-up note. Things rapidly spiral out of control and ultimately he has to choose between people remembering his son for the dickhead he was, or people honoring the memory of the son he would have rather had.
From what I recall, it’s shocking, but the shock serves a higher purpose.
I’ve been letting the objections to Animal House go because I was more into getting responses to the OP gist rather than defend what amounts to an event of questionable grammar in my overall inquiry. But Pantastic hit the very reason I consider Animal House “dark.”
Sexual predation was not funny in 1978, and it was the subject of multiple joke threads
Bullying/hazing was not funny in 1978, and it was the subject of multiple joke threads
Disregard for education was not funny in 1978, and it was the subject of multiple joke threads
And I would disagree that the jokes have simply aged badly (which is how I read “fall flat now but didn’t then”). I believe if you could laugh at AH in 1978, you can laugh at it today, albeit as a person with 39 more years of human interaction, maturity, and empathy development behind you. And a 20 year-old today watching it for the first time has to overcome differences in comedy cinema and acting techniques between today and 39 years ago, in addition to a movie created at a time when filmmakers were less concerned with being misinterpreted by people who have been told to be offended at light treatment of heavy subjects, and that their feelings are too important to endure offense.
It’s been a long, long time since I’ve seen the film, but treating a heavy subject lightly may be appreciated or not depending on the context. Simply treating it lightly is not sufficient to make it dark comedy. It would require in my opinion, the film’s self-awareness about what it’s doing. Unless you’re prepared to argue that most 80s movies, many of which contained a similar light treatment of sexual assault, hazing, and racism, are all dark comedies, I’m not sure I follow your logic. Refresh my memory. What sets Animal House apart from other movies of its time?
What sets it apart for me is that none of the jokes are asides to the central plot. The movie feels more like a showcase of over-the-top wrongness with a plot that sort of accidentally happens, the jokes have a deliberate “we shouldn’t do this but we’re gonna” feel to them. I can’t explain why Revenge of the Nerds doesn’t work the same way for me, as it is in some ways the same movie.
Sexual predation and bulllyign/hazing were generally considered funny in 1978. Hazing was generally seen as something basically harmless, that at most gave people mild injuries or embarrassment and was a frequent subject of jokes in various media. Sexual assault was seen as ‘oh yeah, that’s bad I guess, but let’s laugh at it anyway’. If we adopt your criteria as a standard for Dark Humor, then Ghostbusters and Revenge of the Nerds now qualify as dark comedies, along with a huge slew of 80s teen movies, and Pepe Le Pew Cartoons.
Disregard for education is a common trope in humor even today, I really have no idea why you think that it was generally considered not funny in 1978, especially to the point that someone slacking off in school qualifies a movie as a dark comedy. 2006’s “Acceptance”, for example, about a bunch of slacker kids who start a fake college, is certainly not intended as dark, but would qualify under this standard.
Or maybe societal attitudes towards things like sexual assault, sex with minors, and university hazing have changed radically, and what was considered a light topic at the time simply isn’t any more. And don’t parrot the absurd idea that the 1970s was a time when people didn’t feel their feelings were too important to endure offense, people strongly objected to even seeing gay people to the point that they’d send cops to assault gay hangouts, and people in the south people still objected to the end of segregation and the legalization of interracial marriage to the point of violence.
