The other night @Dendarii_Dame and I were watching “Big Brown Eyes” a Cary Grant comedy featuring fast talk and snappy dialogue - but at the end of the first act or so, the villains have a gunfight in a city park, and kill an infant in its pram, which was a very shocking swerve.
Anyone else know of some examples of surprisingly dark moments in otherwise light comedies (dark comedies have dark moments - that’s a given).
Thor: Ragnarok is pretty much a comedy and probably the second darkest MCU movie after Infinity War. We lost Odin, the warriors three and all of Asguard.
I believe it’s the original National Lampoon’s Vacation movie where Clark Griswold drags a dog to death behind his car.
There’s a streaming comedy series with Craig Robinson called Killing It that I tried really hard to like, but in the very first episode: [SPOILER AHEAD]
Craig Robinson character as a child is outside his father’s store and hears his father shot dead by an armed robber. This is played, if not for laughs, at least as something not particularly sad.
I couldn’t get past that. (I hope I’m not confusing this show with another one, as I’ve seen so many pilots that didn’t hold my attention that I might be conflating it with another one. But I think this was the one.)
Not a spoiler: Also, the premise of the series Sprung is a group of prisoners is released early from prison due to the covid pandemic. They all end up staying in the home of the mother of one of them, who only wants them there in order to help her commit crimes, while they’re trying to go straight. Hijinks ensue. It was a very funny series starring Garret Dillahunt and Martha Plimpton, but I found it heartbreaking that the Dillahunt character was in prison for 26 years for selling pot.
…huh.
:: looks it up ::
Created by Greg Garcia? Of course it was. Have you seen either Raising Hope or My Name is Earl? Does it have the same vibe? (I couldn’t get into Raising Hope for similar reasons to what it sounds like here…but that just seems like a running theme in Garcia shows)
I loved My Name is Earl! I never really got into Raising Hope. My daughters liked it. The couple of times I sat in while they had it on, I didn’t really enjoy it. It just seemed dumb.
Sprung had a lot in common with My Name is Earl, but more dumbed down. I’m guessing it’s more like Raising Hope. Give it a try. Some of the visual gags were great - showing how different people adapted to covid restrictions, especially the Martha Plimpton character.
Oh, I just remembered another part of the show that was too sad for me to contemplate - again having to do with the Dillahunt character’s long incarceration.
The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt comes to mind. I’ve only seen a few episodes but it seemed to be a lighthearted comedy about a survivor of abduction, prolonged imprisonment and rape and how she reorients herself to the world after spending a decade underground as a victim in a religious/sex cult. I think it mostly worked, but it struck me as a pretty big creative risk.
I couldn’t bring myself to give it a try.
The British sitcom Only Fools and Horses was generally pretty funny, although with a bit of a depressing undertone involving as it does two brothers living in a low-income council flat with their ageing grandfather, trying to eke out a living buying and selling junk. But still, it was mostly pretty funny. But there was one episode – the Christmas special at the end of Season 2 – called Diamonds are for Heather that was not intended to be funny and was a sad and poignant drama. Nicely done and well worth the watch, but a bit of a shocker if you were expecting yet another funny sitcom episode.
The very end of the final episode of Blackadder Goes Forth is pretty depressing.
Susan dying from licking the cheap wedding invitation envelopes in “Seinfeld”.
I don’t remember the murder of the dad being played for laughs, but if you didn’t like that it’s a good thing you stopped there, because later on in the series a main character is shot in the head. He lives but loses an eye, and that IS played for laughs.
But also magnificent.
Blackadder had been a successful series of slapstick through history, with Rowan Atkinson starring and guest like Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie.
I watched the last episode with a bunch of pupils at my school.
We roared with laughter at the usual antics of the cast … until the last scene came along.
It was incredibly moving and I remember quietly leaving whilst the pupils sat in silence.
The “Groundhog Day” suicide sequence is pretty damn bleak.
‘Mom’ (tv show about recovering alcoholics) is all over the place. Reminiscing about ludicrous over-the-top crimes in their earlier days, uproarious one-liners, hilarious situations. Also drug overdoses, deaths, estrangement from parents, marital and financial problems, loss of children, miscarriages. And Violet giving the baby up for adoption. 
which was for the best…
That movie has some pretty powerful moments, to be honest. Him trying to save the homeless guy from death. Great movie.
It’s worth watching a “making of” for that episode. They explain how they had no idea how to stick the landing, until in editing, someone decided to try the slow-motion fade out, which just sold the whole scene. They stuck the landing almost by accident.
This.
I’m pretty sure Groundhog Day counts as a dark comedy though. It builds around a horror theme and other dark stuff. For this reason, I’m not mentioning Better Off Dead or Arsenic and Old Lace. Clearly dark comedies.
I was going to watch Only Murders in the Building because it stars Steve Martin Short but a minute in a guy was telling a depressing story about waiting for his father to die. I didn’t make it farther than that. Weird way to start what I assume to be a comedy.