When the gasping drug dealer attempts to run away, and runs straight into a tree
To me, the most hilarious (in a blackly comedic way) scene in the first few episodes was
When Jesse, unable to find the plastic bin Walt was demanding for disposal of the body of the dead meth dealer with acid, gets fed up and uses his upstairs bathtub instead - Walt berates him as to why this is a bad idea just as the ceiling falls in, melted through, with the dissolved body splashing on the floor right in front of them! I didn’t know whether to laugh or puke.
That was only one of the many traumatic yet hilarious moments of this movie.
I remember vividly when I saw it. I was in college when it came out in 1998 and every weekend I just went to the theatre and caught whatever was playing with my girlfriend. One night we went to the arthouse theatre instead. Happiness was playing at 8, so we just bought tickets and saw it. We knew nothing about it beforehand.
Todd Solondz’s other films are like this. Welcome to the Dollhouse makes light of a kid threatening to rape a girl, and Storytelling kills off a family as a sort of Holocaust joke.
Visitor Q is pretty good. The opening scene is of a reporter visiting a prostitute for a news story. She seduces him into having sex with her, and he comes early. She starts making fun of him for being too quick in bed, after which you find out that she is the reporters daughter. The reporter then tells her ‘I don’t have any money, I’ll have to ask your mom to give it to you’.
That was pretty funny. The comedy central roasts can be fairly black, at least sometimes.
Worlds greatest dad is good, but it isn’t ‘too’ black.
I saw Killer Joe this weekend. I would class it as dark comedy rather than Southern Gothic. Me and the rest of the audience laughed a lot. If you see it with a date, don’t suggest getting take out friend chicken on the way home unless they have an equally morbid sense of humor.
I’m not sure how I managed to miss out on Happiness, but I decided to watch it today thanks to this thread. What a sick movie. I loved it.
I’m going to have to watch it again as I missed a few parts. I have a terrible headache and dozed off a couple/few times while watching. But I know the boy came!
The first film that I heard described as a “black comedy” was Fargo, especially when Roger Ebert’s 1996 review uses the word comedy. Ebert Fargo It’s still one of my favorite movies.
Most of what Jim Jarmusch does is black comedy. I especially like Dead Man and Ghost Dog was pretty good, though Broken Flowers was a little too painful.
Natural Born Killers was almost, but the ending got gooped up too much.
But how can you neglect Brazil? Was that merely greyish?