TRUE GRIT was funny, but when I went to see it, with a good-sized audience, nobody laughed but me. Very disconcerting.

While not as dark as Heathers, I liked Friend for the End of the World.

I saw a trailer for Robot & Frank and it's certainly being marketed like a dark comedy.

So SCARFACE (1983) is a comedy cause the movie has plenty of funny lines?

I didn't like that movie but I knew it was supposed to funny cause of the way Nick Cage was acting. I only saw it once on video the first year it hit VHS and the only thing I think I remember is baby diapers and armed stickups. Am I right?

C'mon Mr. Lopez, even you can tell the difference in tone between PULP FICTION and SCARFACE. Many scenes in PF are set up to be comical by the way they're acted and the way the farcical elements are emphasized (e.g. the whole Harvey Keitel section). Several segments of PULP are structured like a comedy while SCARFACE is a straight crime drama that just happens to have some laugh lines here and there.

Compared to the original Scarface it's a freakin' cartoon. It's really hard to take it as a serious drama.

Thank You for Smoking (2005)
Lord of War (2005)
World's Greatest Dad (2009)

I remember hearing about some upcoming Kristin Wiig film that is a dark comedy involving suicide.

Killer Joe has already been mentioned. So the answer is:

Yes, they still make dark comedies.

I'd say the Coen brothers have had quite a few dark comedies. A Serious Man has funny moments but is very dark in terms of what happens to the main character.

My all time favorite dark comedy- After Hours from Martin Scorcese.

They still make them, but I imagine they are a hard sell in terms of getting greenlit. If you look at the history of dark comedies, they almost always wind up being cult films. Basically, they don't start to turn profit for a long time, which studio execs don't see as a success.

Wild Target (2009)

Most of the titles mentioned are not dark comedies (formerly known as black comedies, but that term now causes confusion with "urban" comedies).

dark comedy -- noun
1. A comedy having gloomy or disturbing elements, especially one in which a character suffers an irreparable loss.
2. A comedy characterized by morbid or grimly satiric humor.


In other words, a dark comedy is deliberately poking fun at a topic that one would not consider a humorous topic. Irreverence is used to make light of a uncomfortable topic.

This is older, but am I the only one who considers "Ravenous" to be a dark comedy? This may not qualify since I don't think the intent was to be a comedy ... but the way the dialogue is written one has to wonder.

The last one I saw was Bad Santa.

I always thought Kubrick was the greatest dark comedian in film, with streaks of it in every movie he made. But yeah, most of it has gone to cable TV these days as the movies have become infantilized. Looks like some good movies have been sneaking through in the past year or two, so that gives me hope.

Don't know if it's already been mentioned, but "Eating Raoul" is a big time black comedy. The Criterion Collection Blu-ray is stellar.

As others have mentioned, movies like Four Lions, God Bless America (and World's Greatest Dad, which is even better), Observe and Report, Killer Joe, etc. Killing Them Softly was often darkly comedic.

That's the movie about the army of robot Sarah Palins, right? That was bleak.

Very Bad Things (1998) It's a pitch black comedy with a subversive angle. It could almost be called, Karma: The Movie.

wristcutters: A Love story