Smashing Pumpkins’ “Today” is from the POV of a teen whose about to try to kill himself.
Loudon Wainwright III wrote “Suicide is Painless” for the movie MASH, althogh that wasn’t specifically about teenagers. When they made it into a TV show, they stripped out the lyrics and used it for the opening theme.
Let’s not forget Pearl Jam’s Jeremy, which is hardly pro suicide, but about it none the less.
Also, if you want a more modern suicide comedy, how about some WKUK.
On the TV series Friends, Chandler sometimes made the gesture of putting his finger to his temple as if it were a gun and then “pulling the trigger” and using his other hand to suggest brains blowing out the other side.
That bothered me.
Airplane! has several gags about people committing suicide rather than hear Robert Hayes’s flashback stories.
Loudon Wainwright didn’t write that song. It was written by Mike Altman and Johnny Mandel.
I agree it was a pro-suicide song. But as you noted, the lyrics were removed when the song was used on television. (But Altman still got royalties from the show even though his contribution was the lyrics. Mike Altman ended up making over ten times more money from MASH than his father Robert did for directing the movie.)
Specifically, that song was an answer to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (as well as to Cobain’s subsequent suicide).
Yes, it shows.
Death Cab For Cutie’s “I Will Follow You Into The Dark” can certainly be taken as being about suicide, although that’s not the only way to interpret it.
The funniest suicides (plural!) for comedy are in Groundhog Day. They just won’t stick, so he has to do it again and again.
I do that, sometimes, when I’m having a particularly bad day at work. It honestly never occurred to me that someone might be disturbed by it. I’ll try to stop.
Etgar Keret wrote a short story that the movie Wristcutters was based on.
A poignant comedy I’d recommend highly.
And, as an interesting aside, he was 14 years old when he wrote those lyrics. Not really apropos, but I thought it was interesting when I found out.
Once, while listening to Dingbat, Archie Bunker pantomimed loading a revolver, put it to his head, and slumped over in his easy chair.
What, nobody else here remembers Nothing to Lose? It may not be pro-suicide, but it certainly was very frank about it and without a hint of censoring.
The title song for MASH* tied into the act where the Painless Pole “killed” himself. The shot of him with the rest of the cast in the “Lord’s Supper” pose is hilarious. That was 1970 when the movie came out. I read the book long ago but I don’t know if that was in it or not.
Catch-22 was another novel-to-movie that came out at the same time with dark humor including suicide references.
Looking at the IMDb keyword “suicide” and comedy shows quite a few listings, but I sort of have my doubts about some of them really being all that related. E.g., Abbott and Costello’s Lost in Alaska (1952) starts with them rescuing a suicidal (keyword for that one) miner.
Does Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) count? Lots of murder, can’t recall the suicide reference.
Elton John did the very uptempo “I Think I’m Gonna Kill Myself” (tap dancing by “Legs” Larry Smith of the Bonzo Dog Band).
There’s also Harry Nilsson’s "I’d Rather Be Dead" of about the same time. Unclear if it’s about suicide or dying of natural causes.
Thanks from those of us who are troubled by that gesture. In my case, it has to do with the death of a close family member by gunshot suicide. I was not present for the event in question, but am still bothered by seeing such scenes on TV/in a movie.
You recall how the protagonist was in prison awaiting execution? The murder he was tried and convicted for wasn’t even a murder, it was a suicide and he was wrongly charged with it.
Tying a rope to a rock and yourself and jumping in the water has been done many times in comedies. Harold Lloyd, Laurel & Hardy, and Homer Simpson have all tried it without success.
“Goodbye cruel world!” is a stock line for comedic suicides, and I suspect you could trace it back to Vaudeville.