The Great Depression is considered one of the worst chapters in America's history. The economy was obliterated, and unemployment was at an all time high. It was an era of sorrow with no... OOH, LOOK AT THE PRETTY COLORS!
Black Comedy can show up in the most unexpected places. A series might be the most generic and inoffensive Dom Com around; the darkest subject matter it normally handles might be teens drinking alcohol or married people being tempted by another man/woman. And even then, the subject matter is likely to be treated seriously rather than played for laughs; it might even be the subject of a Very Special Episode.
But then along comes a moment when the series brings in a topic it would normally never touch with a ten-meter pole (abortion, suicide, rape, Nazis, what-have-you) and treats it with just as much casual, lighthearted humor as it does recipes gone wrong or a Two-Timer Date. For that one moment, that one joke, the series becomes a Black Comedy... then it goes right back to being nice and innocuous again.
Note that if a series already is a Black Comedy, it's still possible to fit this trope, but the burst of black comedy has to be really extreme. Imagine that a comedy series deals with plenty of dark subject matter but only in dialogue and then one story the Main Characters actually rape or kill someone. If it is still played as much for laughs as ever, then it would still qualify as a Black Comedy Burst.
A Sub-Trope of both Genre Shift and Mood Whiplash, since they include all possible ways to change the main emotional reactions that are invoked and the type of the story. Compare Surprisingly Creepy Moment. Contrast Big-Lipped Alligator Moment.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Koro-Sensei Quest! is a chibified parody of RPGs. In episode 6, however, Nagisa snaps that "I get enough of that at home" in response to his teammates forcing him into a dress. This is a reference to the Abusive Mother that readers of the source material know he has.
- While the Lyrical Nanoha franchise has never shied away from dark subject matters, its humor tends to be on the lighthearted side... and then there's ViVid Life, which has a gag where Nanoha comes home to find Rio hanging up a noose for a New Year's party because she doesn't know what a wreath is.
- Pokémon the Series: Sun & Moon: The debut of the Ghost Pokémon Mimikyu introduced a Running Gag where Meowth appears to almost die and get Dragged Off to Hell. This is in all likeliness the darkest joke the series has ever done, and it sometimes (though not consistently) gets edited in the English dub (particularly an instance where Meowth is shown face-down in the water).
Comic Books
- Violine: While lying in crocodile-infested water, a man offers Kombo money to save him. Just when Kombo accepts, a crocodile bites his hand with the money off, which lands in the boat. Kombo quickly puts the severed hand (with the money still in it) behind his back while the man is devoured by crocodiles. The hand keeps fighting him throughout the night over the money. This, and the death of the man, is all Played for Laughs, in contrast to other times when people are attacked and killed by crocodiles.
Fan Works
- Calvin & Hobbes: The Series, a Script Fic that imitates a children's show, has a brief one-liner about suicide.
- OSMU: Fanfiction Friction:
- In Chapter 6, the Odd Squad Mobile Unit goes to visit Todd at his Home For Villains™. Oswald hears screaming and asks Todd about it, only for him to state that he's currently attempting to phase out electro-shock treatments. And then Omar takes it a step further by asking if electro-shock treatments is how his hair is styled.
- In Chapter 16, the Mobile Unit and Octavius go to The Nutcracker, and while looking at the menu, Orla remarks that the restaurant doesn't have roast cat as part of its "old-fashioned" cuisine. Octavius chokes on his water in response, and all Oswald says is that they refuse to let Orla cook anymore.
Films — Animation
- Frozen (2013):
- Kristoff's family, the trolls, lightly suggest offing Anna's fiancé while trying to get Kristoff and Anna together... in the middle of a cheery Crowd Song, no less! And while Anna was slowly dying of her frozen heart... not that anyone mentions it until afterwards.
- Olaf, a sentient snowman, has no idea that the summer would melt him, so he'd love for it to be summer. He even sings a whole song about him looking forward to doing whatever snow does in summer, including things which he doesn't realise would melt him faster, like tanning.
- Near the end of Hotel Transylvania (2012), when the monsters are racing to the airport to stop Jonathon from leaving, the road is blocked by a herd of sheep. Without missing a beat, Wayne (a werewolf) immediately races out and gobbles all of them up at lightning speed while the other monsters watch in horror. Then he gets back into the car with a satisfied expression and burps up some clumps of wool. His friends are not amused.
Wayne: What? Now there's no sheep in the road! Let's go!
Murray: That was pretty sick, man. - Madagascar 1: When Skipper and the penguins return to Madagascar on a ship they took over, Gloria asks where all the people are, and Skipper gives a surprisingly dark answer for a family film.
Gloria: Where are the people?
Skipper: We killed 'em and ate their livers. [Gloria looks horrified. Skipper just grins] Gotcha, didn't I? - Moana: Moana and Maui reach the entrance to Tamatoa's lair, Moana says that she doesn't see anything to indicate an entrance.
Maui: That's because it only appears after a human sacrifice. [Beat] Kidding!
- ParaNorman: Norman's ability to see ghosts lends itself to a fair amount of innocuous ghost-related humor but about half an hour in there's a scene where Norman has to pry a book out of a corpse's hands. It's entirely Played for Laughs.
- Peter Pan (1953): Captain Hook nonchalantly shoots one of his own men — for singing badly. Then later, he tosses another of his pirates overboard, for speculating about "no splash?!" after Wendy walks the plank.
- Phineas and Ferb The Movie: Candace Against the Universe:
- The alien guards that Perry beats up land in a pool. One of them declares that they're okay, until a monster rises from the water and swallows them. As the monster slowly resubmerges, the guard is heard remarking in a deadpan voice that they're definitely not okay. Particularly notable for being one of the few times in Phineas and Ferb that death is strongly implied onscreen.
- Later, as the Doofenshmirtzes are trying to use Heinz's Replace-With-A-Chicken-Inator to switch places with the nearest chicken and return to Earth, their attempt backfires because the nearest chicken is on Feebla-Oot instead of Earth*. As Heinz tries to come up with a solution, he holds up an axe labeled "Axe-Inator" while looking at the chicken and ominously saying that "accidents can happen...". Vanessa hastily convinces her father to find another solution (which ends up being switching the Inator's setting to switch with the furthest chicken instead of the nearest one).
- Shrek 2: The first movie was already rife with adult jokes, but one of the darkest jokes in any Dreamworks film comes early when, in the middle of a fairly sweet romantic montage, Shrek and Fiona are making out under beach waves and Shrek accidentally finds himself making out with pseudo-Ariel. Fiona then grabs her by the fish tail and hurls her back into the sea, where she gets eaten by sharks. Neither Shrek nor Fiona shows much concern about this.
- Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: After her iconic transformation from a stone-cold queen into a hideous old peddler hag, the Evil Queen begins openly exulting in the cruelty she'd previously been subtle about. While she's taking a stroll through her dungeon, she comes across the skeleton of a man who died trying to reach a jug of water placed just a fingertip out of reach. Horrifying — until the Queen begins teasing the dead body.
Evil Queen: Thirsty? Have a drink! [kicks the jug of water right into the skeleton]
- The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water:
- There's a throwaway gag where SpongeBob and Plankton have to disconnect Karen's monitor from her robotic body. Since she's a computer, it doesn't harm her, but SpongeBob is still freaked out, saying "I've never carried a head around before." Plankton calmly responds, "Don't worry, you get used to it", the implication being that Plankton has actually decapitated people before.
- The emotional high point of the movie comes when SpongeBob gives a moving speech and willingly turns himself in to the townspeople, proclaiming his willingness to "take one for the team". Then...
Squidward: [ecstatically] You heard him, everybody!
- The Super Mario Bros. Movie: Lumalee's one of Bowser's prisoners who believes that the only way out for himself and the rest of his prisoners is to die, and states it cheerfully. Not only that, in the climax he's outright cheering when his cage almost goes into lava, and disappointed when he's saved.
- Trolls 1: In the flashback showing Branch's paranoia over Bergens, he runs through a birthday party and tips the cake over whilst screaming about them. Next he runs through a wedding, and tips the cake over, continuing to scream about Bergens. Finally he runs through a funeral... and tips the coffin over, causing the corpse to tip out onto the floor... whilst still screaming about Bergens. Bonus points because closer examination reveals that the corpse and his widow are the bride and groom from the previous marriage.
- Turning Red: Ming confronting Devon and demanding to know how old he is, believing that he's thirty. The tired kid replies that he's seventeen.
Ming: Oh, see, see? This is what happens when you don't wear sunblock and do drugs all day!
- Wreck-It Ralph:
- In a brief gag, Kano gets a bit too excited and performs his most famous Fatality on a zombie at the Bad-Anon support group meeting. Yes, that one. The blood and organs are gooey and purplish rather than red, but it's still quite likely the most violent joke in any Disney-produced movie.
- The end of the movie has a downplayed example where Vanellope engages in this. When it's revealed that she's a princess, the other racers who had bullied her prior to this knowledge beg for forgiveness. Instead, she says she'll sentence them all to execution. As the racers expectedly freak out, she assures them that she's just pulling their leg and gladly accepts their apologies. It becomes downplayed when you remember Death Is Cheap in a character's native game and they'll just resurrect good as new like nothing happened.
Films — Live-Action
- Annie 1981: Most of its darker moments were very much not played for comedy, but there was this one scene where the eponymous girl, Daddy Warbucks, and Grace Ferrell decide to go to the movies and sing a song about how movies only have happy endings... only for the movie to be Camille, a real movie that has a Downer Ending.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- After Spider-Man saves a group of students on a field trip in Spider-Man: Homecoming, Peter's teacher declares his relief at not losing a student on a field trip... again.
- In Avengers: Endgame, the heroes are brainstorming plans on how to save the world. What's Rhodey's suggestion? Travel back in time to strangle baby Thanos. Bruce Banner's horrified reaction (and Rhodey's refusal to apologize) makes it that much funnier.
[Rhodes makes a gesture of strangling a baby with a rope, complete with choking sound]
Banner: First of all, that's horrible...
Rhodes: It's Thanos!
- Mary Poppins: One of the jokes Mary's uncle Albert tells is about a cat being fatally run over.
- Matilda crosses this with a Funny Background Event: During the prologue, when Zinnia places baby Matilda in the kitchen sink for a bath, there's a can turned over on the counter reading "POISON - Keep out of the reach of children", left perfectly within Matilda's reach.
- In Men in Black 3, during Jay's time jump from the top of the Empire State Building he briefly passes through The Great Depression and locks eyes with a stock broker in the process of falling to his death. The franchise generally doesn't shy away from dark comedy, but this scene still stands out.
- A Minecraft Movie:
- The pink sheep that the gang finds upon entering the Overworld is last seen being ripped apart by zombies (all we can see is the wool in the zombies' hands) as it makes the memetic "Screaming Goat" cry.
- Malgosha sees an adorable little Piglin child neglecting its duties and instead doodling a picture. Taking on a kindly persona, she lures the shy child to her and asks it to show her its art. As it does, she brandishes a knife and stabs the child right through the drawing, turning it into a skewered porkchop which she tosses away. Also serves as an Establishing Character Moment for her, as she is later revealed to despise creativity of any kind.
- When the gang wants something to eat, Steve reveals a device that roasts chickens alive in lava, automatically cooking them. He sings a catchy tune as he subjects one unfortunate chicken to this fate.
- Muppet Treasure Island: The "Sailing to Adventure" musical number has several moments of dark comedy inserted: the singers belting out "AND PEOPLE DIE BY FALLING OVERBOARD!", for example, or having three of the pirates discussing their preferred forms of murder before dismissing it as "just kidding".
- Our Miss Brooks: In The Movie, Miss Brooks sardonically remarks that she's up for a game of Russian Roulette.
- In Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), Tom hides Sonic in a bag and smuggling him into a building. When someone besides him hears Sonic making noise within the bag, this exchange alluding to child abduction ensues:
Sonic: How much longer? I can't breathe in here! ...Hellooooo? Anybody there?
Bystander: Do you have your child in that bag?
Tom: No. I mean, yes, it's a child, but it's not mine.
[pause]
Bystander 2: [disturbed] That's not your child?
Tom: Relax, I'm a cop, okay? Plus he likes it in there, don't cha, buddy?
Sonic: Why would I like it in here? This is worse than the dog cage you had me in earlier!
[the bystanders stare at the bag in horror]
Tom: He's such a kidder.
[Maddie hastily closes the zip]
Sonic: [muffled] No, I'm scared of the dark! Is anybody there?!
[the bystanders start nervously edging away as Sonic is saying this] - Superman (2025) starts with Superman crash landing in the Arctic, beaten and bloodied. He finds the strength to whistle to call in Krypto the Superdog, who runs up to his master... and begins playing and bouncing on his master, unaware of his injured state.
Literature
- Little Princess: "I Don't Want to Go to Hospital" has the Princess suffering from a painful lump in her nose, and the General tries to take it out with his sword. Then, she gets taken to the hospital against her will tied up and being wheeled in a stroller.
- Romeosaurus and Juliet Rex is a lighthearted retelling of Romeo and Juliet that ends with both sides reconcilling and having a feast... as the asteroid hits.
Live-Action TV
- In a Boy Meets World Halloween Episode, everything's going along like a typical episode for the first act, nothing that might be objectionable for family viewing. Then a guy named Kenny is suddenly murdered. In the past, this series has treated sex, alcoholism, juvenile delinquency, and religious cults with deadly seriousness in Very Special Episodes. When another human being is killed, however, the only response it gets is, "Oh my god! They killed Kenny!" After that, the episode kills off a lot more people, including most of the Main Characters, and it's mostly played for laughs. Of course, it's All Just a Dream, but there was no way the audience could have known that before the first murder occurred.
- Brooklyn Nine-Nine:
- Despite being a cop sitcom, the show manages to be light-hearted and fun without going too often into Black Comedy. However, there are three episodes that fall into Black Comedy. "Sabotage" involves the main character, Jake, getting kidnapped and being held hostage by a stoned ex-lawyer seeking revenge. "AC/DC" has Jake suffering through multiple injuries (three cracked ribs, three broken toes, a hairline fracture, et cetera...) within one week. "The Crime Scene" has the squad nonchalantly investigating a horrific crime scene where the floor and walls are practically painted with blood...and then a deliveryman comes in, immediately starts screaming and retching, and runs away in horror, leading Jake to wonder aloud if maybe they're starting to get a little desensitized to gruesome violence.
- After several seasons of mostly lighthearted cop comedy, Season 5 opens with several episodes of Rosa and Jake in prison, where the comedy stems from such light and airy topics as guard corruption, prison politics, and Jake's cellmate's child cannibalism.
- The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: In "Where There's a Will, There's a Way", Hilary's boyfriend dies on live television when he proposes to her while bungee-jumping. The Studio Audience laughs. After his funeral, Hilary somehow brings home someone else's ashes (her boyfriend wasn't even cremated), with Geoffrey nonchalantly "showing him (the urn) out". If that wasn't jarring enough, the scene becomes a Running Gag in a show that would normally treat the death of a character and the psychological effect it has on their widow very seriously. Notably, during a Clip Show, this scene is included during a series of clips that otherwise highlight Hilary's usual melodramatic reactions to vain inconveniences like her fashion not being to her liking or other usual Hilary-centric humor.
- In Friends, Rachel's Bloomingdale's boss Joanna is killed off-screen by getting hit by a cab, right after agreeing to give Rachel a promotion. Rachel is shocked when she first hears the news, but then quickly starts asking if Joanna had said anything or left any paperwork about a promotion. She hadn't, and Rachel is clearly more upset about the loss of her promotion than Joanna's sudden death. Then Joanna's other (former) assistant Sophie walks in looking very happy and Rachel asks if she heard what happened. Sophie gleefully answers, "I sure did!" — Joanna had been horrible to her.
- In Full House, this trope is the result of having a Friday the 13th-themed wedding in a kid-friendly sitcom, courtesy of Kimmy.
- Happy Days usually doesn't do dark humour; usually whenever something dark happens, it's a Very Special Episode. However...:
- In "Fearless Fonzarelli", Ralph comments that he wishes his favourite stunt show on TV would do a human sacrifice.
- In "The Fonz is Allergic to Girls", when Fonzie says he wants to give Richie his bathroom "office" when he's "gone", and that he talked to a doctor, Richie thinks Fonzie must be dying and coyly says, "You're not gonna say that you're... y-y'know?" Fonzie says, "No, worse!'', to which Richie replies that surely nothing's worse than "you know".
- How I Met Your Mother:
- One episode has Ted trying to get a job designing a guy's house. As Ted talks to the guy, though, it becomes clear he's a Serial Killer who wants Ted to build him a sound-proof "murder house". While all the characters are appropriately freaked out by this, Ted's run in with a serial killer is never played for anything but laughs. And it's usually such a sweet Romantic Comedy.
- The time when Barney, the resident Licensed Sexist, casually mentions that, on one occasion, he's pretty sure he sold a woman.
Barney: I didn't speak the language, but I shook a guy's hand, he gave me the keys to a Mercedes, and I left her there.
- There are a few moments in iCarly that don't really fit with the rest of the show's humour. One is an elderly clown at a party having a heart attack and dying, with the rest of the cast treating it casually.
- It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia may be one of the darkest sitcoms on television, but has several moments that are above par — for example, Frank blowing up a guy's head with a musket shot.
- The ending of "Mac Is a Serial Killer" surpasses any expectations that might have been set by the episode title itself. The gang is interrogating Mac about his (alleged) serial-killing ways, when Charlie opens the fridge in the apartment they've borrowed for the interrogation, only to find a dozen human heads. Then Dee's weird friend Gary, the actual tenant of the apartment and clearly the actual serial killer, comes home. Everyone looks at each other in silence for a moment... and Frank revs up the chainsaw. Smash Cut to the end credits.
- "The Gang Turns Black", a Musical Bizarro Episode, has the gang, well, turn black. At the end, Charlie starts singing about how discrimination is not always clear... then he gets violently shot by the cops, who perceive Charlie as a young black kid. Then the gang starts singing again, including Charlie. Granted, it is All Just a Dream, but still.
- In "Asskickers United: Mac and Charlie Join a Cult", the gang has started a cult and garnered a few dim-witted members. The scheme devolves into the gang competing to see who the followers are more obedient to, culminating in Dennis ordering one of them to immolate himself, which he does. The gang frequently get people injured or maimed, but being responsible for violent, painful deaths is a huge rarity even for them.
- Kamen Rider Gaim: The Crossover with Ressha Sentai ToQger is mostly Lighter and Softer fare — in a Gen Urobuchi series with the Central Theme of Growing Up Sucks, a team of comedy superheroes who turn their childhood imagination into a source of power feel almost like Tom Bombadil. One gag, however, is surprisingly dark — the ToQgers engage in a Humongous Mecha battle outside Takatora's window, who receives reports of the destruction from his underlings but ignores them because ToQ-Oh is always gone when he turns around. Takatora is a tragic antagonist — a highly idealistic man being crushed by the monstrously evil actions he has to take in order to save the world... but shortly before the crossover, it was revealed that he's suffering from Good Cannot Comprehend Evil — he's so trusting that he's completely blind to how his lieutenants have gone mad with power and seized control of the plan for their own goals. In addition, the ToQgers' trains are invisible to people who can't think like a child, implying that the real reason Takatora can't see them is because he's dead on the inside.
- The King of Queens has an episode with an uncharacteristically dark parody of Duel where Doug buys an ice cream truck and is later stalked and suffers repeated murder attempts by an unseen driver in another truck.
- Not that Mad Men was ever known for being light, but a guy randomly getting his foot sawed off by a lawn mower certainly qualifies, especially with the lashings of Bloody Hilarious and all the dark jokes that came in the incident's wake.
Harry: He's going to lose the foot.
Roger: Right when he got it in the door. - The Mary Tyler Moore Show has the episode "Chuckles Bites the Dust", in which the staff of WJM-TV has humorous reactions to the absurd death of Chuckles the Clown. It's widely considered one of the show's best episodes.
- The Office (US) accounted for the departure of the main character, Michael Scott, by bringing in a replacement boss played by Will Ferrell named Deangelo Vickers, who is a huge prick and a passive-aggressive sexist to boot. However, the show needed to get rid of him after one episode, so they write him off by having him fuck up a basketball dunk (on a dare from Jim) and receive a massive brain injury that hospitalizes him and leaves him as a babbling vegetable, with a later episode confirming the effect to be permanent. This presumably orphans his four children as well.
- The Only Fools and Horses episode "A Royal Flush" has largely been disowned by the fandom. It involves Rodney falling for an upper-class girl, only for Del to sabotage the relationship with his boorish, obnoxious behaviour, which is played up even more than usual. Afterwards, Del is completely unsympathetic and even mocks Rodney for calling him out on it. The show creator John Sullivan and David Jason have both shown regret that the episode was made.
- The Really Loud House: Lincoln and Clyde bust the dessert kingpin, Milkshake Marty, who was rumored to have ground up his rival's gang and drank them as a milkshake. From his jail cell, Marty heartily confirms the rumor, saying his rival was "armed and delicious". This is followed by one of his goons pointedly slurping a milkshake.
- The Red Green Show:
- In a 1996 episode, one person writes to the experts complaining about a string of bad luck, culminating with stating that he worked as a travel agent for ValuJet.
- In the 2002 episode "Snowed In", Mike makes frequent comments about killing and eating Harold. Keep in mind this is a G-rated show.
- In a 1996 episode, one person writes to the experts complaining about a string of bad luck, culminating with stating that he worked as a travel agent for ValuJet.
- Scrubs usually plays death for drama, even if some of the medical humor gets pretty dark. The one exception is a conversation between Dr. Kelso and Dr. Reid about a psychiatrist not showing up to a lecture on fear of public speaking:
Reid: Why, because he's afraid of speaking in public? [chuckles]
Kelso: [solemly] No, his depression finally got the best of him and he hung himself. - Seinfeld, as mentioned in the trope description, had frequent overtones of Black Comedy. Then George's fiancée abruptly drops dead, poisoned by licking the glue on the cheap envelopes George picked out. George tells his friends what happened, there's a Beat, and they just go on with the rest of their conversation like nothing happened.
- Sesame Street:
- A sketch parodying Game of Thrones has jokes about some of the deaths on the latter show — all likely to go over the heads of kids too young to watch Game of Thrones, but older viewers are likely to be stunned that Sesame Street made a joke about the Red Wedding.
- "Ten Little Greeblies" is seemingly a typical Nursery Rhyme about counting backwards... but then it says that eight of them flew to heaven (in planes), but that one "took a shortcut"... and he's seen crashing his plane.
- Star Trek: Discovery overall has a fairly serious tone, especially in the first season, with a plotline involving the Federation in a pitched war with the Klingon Empire. Once Discovery travels to the Mirror Universe, where things are even bleaker than they were before, the mood tends to get lightened with punctuated bursts of Black Comedy, like when Burnham ends up stabbing Captain Connor to death in self-defense, only for his senior officers to respond with a Slow Clap.
- Victorious:
- A relatively tame one compared to the three below it, but "Sleepover at Sikowitz's" features a sub-plot where Tori's parents are celebrating their anniversary by watching Terms of Endearment, and after the students at Sikowitz's break character and get banished, they come to visit their house and find the movie hilarious for unknown reasons.
- "Beggin' on Your Knees" features Cat accidentally getting phone calls from people who just had car accidents. One of these people dies on the line. Everyone seems a bit shocked and bewildered by this but don't really say too much about it.
- "Ice Cream for Ke$ha" features Tori trying to drown her sister Trina.
- "Tori Gets Stuck" has a vial of blood explode on Tori and Robbie.
- It's perhaps more of an escalating trend than a burst, but the third season of Wizards of Waverly Place has Alex killing another wizard, Justin's girlfriend being abducted and Max inadvertently bringing about a genocide that claims the life of every monster hunting wizard except Justin.
Music
- "Weird Al" Yankovic songs tend to have a fair bit of dark humor, but it's rarely anything that could actually offend anyone... which makes the following examples all the more jarring.
- Given that "Another One Rides the Bus" was one of his earliest songs, this line could be Early-Installment Weirdness:
- A more protracted but less famous example is his early song "Mr. Frump in the Iron Lung".
- A particularly magnificent example is the song "Foil". At first, it appears to be a simple song about preserving leftover food in aluminum foil (which would be right up Weird Al's alley). But then halfway through the song, it suddenly veers into conspiracy theories and alien mind-control rays... before revealing this was just the buildup to a Tinfoil Hat joke. What makes it particularly noteworthy is that it comes completely out of nowhere, with absolutely no build-up whatsoever, and the ending implies that everything he was saying was true.
Tabletop Games
- Pokéthulhu is a goofy game that mashes up Pokémon with the Cthulhu Mythos, with things like the Team Rocket analogues being named Derleth and Bloch, Scooby-Doo references, and entries about episodes of the Pokethulhu anime with names like "The Yutz from Yukky" and "In the Future, Everyone Will Be Squamous For Fifteen Minutes"; it's not without dark comedy, such as the Shaggy Rogers parody Robbing the Dead, but it's mostly not too heavy. Then you get to the Chaos Cards, which can be used in play to do things like summon rains of fish or cause a Potty Emergency. The triggers for these are all references to one version or another of the anime, requiring you to quote note various scenes: the Kadath Belch-A-Riffic anthem, for example, or performing the Mister Sweetslush jingle, or Randy's way of talking Derleth out of killing herself at Waite's point — wait, what?
Video Games
- While Black Comedy is never far in the world of Banjo-Kazooie, the fates of George and Mildred Ice Cube in Banjo-Tooie stand out.
- Mildred sends you on a quest to find her husband, but doesn't offer a reward. However, there is a frozen Jinjo clearly visible inside her. Do the math.
- George, meanwhile, was blown away to Cloud Cuckoo Land. No, really. He asks you to push him off the ledge so that he can fall back to his wife far below. Unfortunately, George didn't consider the possibility of falling into the LAVA side of Hailfire Peaks, and lands in a pool of boiling water. Conveniently enough, this allows Banjo to complete a Fetch Quest from earlier. Yay!
- Scrutinizing or Inquiring one particular guard in Octopath Traveler gives the player this:
"This guard who spends all day staring at the night sky might seem to be neglecting his duties, but nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, in gazing at the clouds drifting overhead and contemplating the banality of existence, he has awakened to the reality that he is the figment of a dead god's imagination."
- Stardew Valley:
- The game has a cheery and relaxed atmosphere where it's impossible to kill your animals (but if you don't feed them and pet them, they won't produce food), but in the intro at the soul-crushing Joja Corp., there's both one employee who appears to be chugging prescription pills and the skeleton of another employee lying in a cubicle.
- The lowest possible score on the Fall Festival strength game is "George's knee". George is paraplegic.
Visual Novels
- Saya's route in Little Busters! opens with her attempting to murder Riki multiple times, and getting very close to managing it. None of the other characters seem to consider this any more than a tasteless prank. He won't actually die permanently, since this is in the dream world, but he doesn't know that and everyone else is keeping up the masquerade. What makes this especially out of place is that the whole game is based around how difficult it is to deal with the death of a loved one — in fact, the whole reason anything in the game happened at all is because Kyousuke knew Riki and Rin would be completely devastated by his, Masato's, and Kengo's death, and the whole game revolves around helping them to accept that their friends' death doesn't have to ruin their lives forever. Though apparently when it's Riki, it's not that important...?
Web Animation
- hololive's official material usually has an upbeat and wacky tone, though that certainly hasn't stopped the staff and talents from inserting a few of these:
- A-chan frequently makes jokes about being in a Soul-Crushing Desk Job or hololive being a black company,note with all the depressing conditions that that implies.
- Sakamata Chloe, the resident Perky Female Minion of Secret Society HoloX, has two: In a segment featuring her, Marine, Pekora and Luna doing a guillotine quiz, Chloe introduces herself as normal before making an offhanded remark about how the world would be incensed if you killed an orca (which Chloe is) with a guillotine. Then, in her debut episode of Holo no Graffiti, she suddenly drops this line while daydreaming about going on a tropical retreat:
Chloe: I wish the waves would wash away all the blood on my hands.
Marine: Down, cleaner, down!
- Homestar Runner is a fairly light-hearted series, (for a web-cartoon standards at least) but every once in a while will crack a dark joke. For example, in one Strong Bad Email, while Strong Bad is listing off Cereals named after sound effects, the last one is "Gunshots in a Crowded Mall".
- RWBY is a fairly lighthearted show (for the first two seasons, anyway), but it dabbles in a little of this. For example, at one point Jaune is having trouble keeping up in a World of Badass, and upset over a few other things as well. His partner Pyrrha takes him up to the roof of their school; her intention is (ostensibly) just to have someplace private to talk things over, but he reassures her that he's "not that depressed." Her horrified reaction is what sells it.
- RWBY Chibi, being all comedy sketches and minimal plot, has a few BCBsnote as well. Highlights include Ruby (almost) accidentally hanging herself with her cape, Jaune drowning because Neptune was afraid to come down to the water and haul him out, Ruby pulling an adorably manipulative Bedtime Brainwashing on Weiss (actually, on all of her teammates), and the entire sketch starring Ren and Nora that turns out to be an homage to Misery.
Web Videos
- American High Digital:
- The second video on bathroom passes has one evidently be to hunt down a deer, which Grace is visibly horrified from doing.
- In a video that mostly uses absurdism for humor, Grace in "Professional Frats" says the knitting frat she's is differentiated from a club by having a ton of sexual assault accusations.
- Carmilla the Series: Episode 20 has Laura interrupt Carmilla's telling of her Dark and Troubled Past with a puppet show ("This is flashback material!"). However, she stops when the story gets really bleak.
Western Animation
- Adventure Time:
- "It Came from the Nightosphere" is littered with this, like Abadeer singing a little jingle as he stomps on ants to suck their souls, or Lumpy Space Princess voluntarily getting inside Abadeer's soul pouch because everyone else was doing it.
- At the end of "Holly Jolly Secrets: Part 2", when they reach the final of the Ice King's tapes, which is an Apocalyptic Log detailing the slow descent of Simon Petrikov into madness as he becomes the Ice King. It's a massive tearjerker/horror moment, yet the first reaction to it?
Jake: [Valley Girl tone] Drama bomb!
- "Betty" has Ice King (or rather, a temporarily restored Simon) describe his And I Must Scream existence as "living with eternal diaperbutt".
- The Amazing World of Gumball:
- The Baby Pizza sequence from "The Job". Gumball and Darwin are delivering pizzas, and one house has a pair of pizza people who think the pizzas delivered are children rather than food, which Darwin and Gumball play along with. Seconds later, Gumball accidentally drops the pizza on the floor with a splat — tomato sauce flies everywhere and the pizza parents are mortified.
- In "The Pest", Gumball sees his baby sister Anais beating up a bunch of her stuffed animals as training, and confesses to a bunch of mean pranks he played on her out of fear that she'll attack him. Anais says she's not angry at him, making Gumball tell Darwin to abandon their plan: we then see Darwin throw away a shovel he was brandishing to bash Anais, his four year-old sister, in the head with.
- In "The Parasite", Gumball gives Darwin, Anais, Jodie, and himself bagged lunches — one of which contains a poisoned sandwich. After much mixing around, the four tentatively take a bite and realize that none of the sandwiches they have are poisoned. Ambulance Cut to Richard gurgling on the ground, with the bitten sandwich next to him and the phone off the hook with the 911 operator trying to contact him.
- "The Night" has a scene where a doll version of Anais is tortured by Daisy the Donkey while a creepy Ironic Nursery Rhyme plays in the background. At the end, Daisy wakes up and says it was her own dream.
Anais doll: Please, end this.
Daisy: Never. - In "The Vase", when Richard miraculously manages to hold onto an ugly vase while his hands are slippery, Gumball complains, "Why couldn't you have managed that when I was a baby?"
- The series overall became way more open to sudden dark moments despite becoming Denser and Wackier in later seasons. The fact that most of the characters are based on objects means loads of "deaths" or really painful injuries, following the baby pizza example. There's even a character whose entire purpose is getting horribly eaten or destroyed every time he shows up, which is fine to showcase because he's a living piece of toast.
- American Dad!:
- In "Virtual In-Stanity", Roger, working as a limo driver, spends a night chauffeuring around a group of drunk frat guys who run off without paying his fee (twenty dollars). He responds to this by systematically stalking and murdering them. The entire thing is Played for Laughs.
- "Love, A.D. Style" starts off innocently enough with Roger developing a crush on Hayley, but reaches nightmarish territory when Roger knocks her out and holds her prisoner in an ice factory, where he ties her arms and legs to an old mattress and tells her that he plans on cutting her flesh off and wearing it. The ending has Roger cut off Jeff's skin and grafts it onto his own, which is played for laughs. You know, a lot of Roger moments can come off this way.
- In "Roger's Baby", Francine tells Hayley that she's been pregnant four times. Hayley counts that she, Steve, and the baby that Francine was a surrogate for are her only kids, the implication being that the other pregnancy was a miscarriage, an abortion, or was put up for adoption.
- Animaniacs wasn't afraid to have sketches with dark humor. For example, "The Ballad of Magellan" ends with Ferdinand Magellan's death at the hands of angry natives in the Philippines, and plays it for laughs:
Yakko: They sailed due west to the Philippine Islands
Magellan was pleased as the natives drew near
But then someone shouted "I think they're attacking!"
Magellan said "What?", and got hit by a spear! - Archer:
- Although the show runs on Black Comedy, one scene in the Dreamland season is worth mentioning. It depicts the origin story of the Dreamland version of Kreiger, where it reveals that he was a Jew in World War II who faked his death and came back as a Nazi scientist. He hindered the Nazis by sabotaging programmes to make cyborgs by killing his patients and wasting as much of their money as possible. He and his nurse had also fallen in love. Then Kreiger is confronted by Nazi scientists, and he sends cyborg dogs to maul them to death. This scene is three minutes long, and in contrast to the show's usual style, it's played completely seriously... until the nurse says that she hates Kreiger for being a Jew, and Kreiger casually has the dogs maul her to death.
- The very next episode has a one-liner about Domestic Abuse.
Kreiger: [explaining his black eye] I... walked into a door? Repeatedly?
Charlotte (Cheryl): Oh, yeah... my mother used to do that.
- Bluey:
- In the episode "Unicorse", when Bluey asks Dad's Unicorse puppet what his favorite food is, he goes up to Bluey's face and quietly says "children". Bluey barely responds, but Unicorse immediately goes back to being annoying instead of dark when he gives his real answer of fried chicken.
- In the short "Hungry", Bandit pretends to be hungry, then pretends to eat Bluey alive, then pretends to vomit her up (because kids don't agree with his character) and eat her again.
- In the short "Butlers", the Heeler sisters' imaginary house has a crocodile pit put in to avoid bedtime.
- "Onesies" is about Bingo pretending to eat people while dressed as a cheetah. At one point, Bandit says that he can't help, as he's "dead", meaning he must lie on the ground until the game is over.
- BoJack Horseman has never shied away from playing any dark subject for laughs, but some jokes are jet-black enough even by their standards.
- Cordovia's situation, with armless citizens getting their arms badly reattached, kids hungry enough to try to eat someone and daily bombings killing millions, is as far removed from the usual Hollywoo(d) shenanigans and should be depressing; yet it's hilarious by the over-the-top way it's presented and Sebastian St. Clair's uncaring, narcissistic handling of the disaster. Of course, following the series's tradition, this is eventually Played for Drama when Diane arrives.
- In "That's Too Much, Man!", BoJack, drunk, talks to a kid he thinks is Todd, which the kid's parents confuse as an attempt to kidnap their son. Then they remember that BoJack's a rich celebrity and they try pimping out the little boy.
- The Boondocks is no stranger to Black Comedy, but some jokes are especially dark even by the show's standards:
- "Attack of the Killer Kung Fu Wolf Bitch" becomes shockingly cynical near the end. The episode features Granddad inviting his new date, a lovely woman named Luna... who's revealed to secretly be a psychotic Yandere martial artist who's killed people before. However, the episode later reveals that she's actually a deeply insecure and anxious woman who suffered from both an abusive childhood and multiple abusive relationships (all shown through flashbacks that are simultaneously played for drama and laughs) and just desperately wants to be loved but is constantly gaslighted through an earpiece by her Straw Feminist best friend, driving her to commit her violent actions. After she attempts to capture, torture and kill Granddad on her friend's orders, she suffers a breakdown and Granddad manages to talk her down with some sage advice, telling her to move on from the past and turn her life around. It actually works and she's about to leave and start anew... only for her friend to call her for a final round of gaslighting, driving her insecurities to the breaking point and causing her to blow herself up. This is witnessed by the Freemans and Tom, but aside from possibly Huey, they have a largely deadpan reaction to it. The final shot of the episode is her friend still talking to her through the now-abandoned earpiece in the explosion's wreckage, unaware of her death.
- The Teaser of "A Date with the Booty Warrior" (taking the form of a Lost Episode of To Catch a Predator) has the titular rapist lure and rape Chris Hansen on camera (mercifully, the action isn't in the camera's view, so we only get to see Chris's face screaming as he does so).
- In one episode of Cow and Chicken, the Red Guy lures almost everyone in the world into a trailer that he claimed he was giving away for free. One woman who hears him abandons her baby in the park, whose stroller then rolls down the pavement.
- The Cuphead Show!:
- In "Sweater Off Dead", the Devil gets so elated, he throws a party for himself and his henchmen. Why? Because the world is plunged in famine, overeating, and three new wars with massive casualties on both sides. Even better/worse, one of these wars (or potentially all three of them) is heavily hinted at being none other than World War II itself!
- Basically all of "Dirt Nap" is a combination between this and Unexpectedly Dark Episode, with the normally grandfatherly Elder Kettle being accidentally gaslit by Cuphead and Mugman, suspecting that they're planning on killing him (they were talking about burying their pet worm), attempting to kill them (essentially his own grandchildren) in response, and then accidentally falling victim to his own traps, with the episode ending ambiguously as to whether he even survives (not that it matters, given that he's alive and well in the next episode).
- DC Super Hero Girls (2019): In "#SoulSisters", Katana is stripping criminals' souls from their bodies, leaving them comatose. Babs's response is a casual, "So we have to hide a body? Big deal! I'm from Gotham!"
- Family Guy:
- "Peter Griffin: Husband, Father... Brother?" ends with a shot of Quagmire walking in on a Bound and Gagged high school cheerleader in a bathroom stall.
Quagmire: Dear diary: jackpot!
- In "Stew-Roids", Meg is crying over not being invited to Chris's party and Lois is unable to console her, eventually giving her a bottle of sleeping pills and The Bell Jar, saying "I'm gonna look the other way and whatever happens happens."
- In "Tom Tucker: The Man and His Dream", a Cutaway Gag shows a bloodstained Peter after killing Stewie by putting him through a paper shredder.
- In "Family Guy Viewer Mail #2", Meg gives Stewie one of her prized possessions while crying. Stewie picks up on the implications and worriedly points out, "Red flag!"
- "Grimm Job" ends on Meg having hung herself, with the episode lingering on the shot in silence before cutting to credits.
- "Peter Griffin: Husband, Father... Brother?" ends with a shot of Quagmire walking in on a Bound and Gagged high school cheerleader in a bathroom stall.
- In the first episode of FETCH! with Ruff Ruffman, Khalil, Anna, and Julia cross the street and shout "Thank you!" to the cars letting them pass. Ruff chimes in with "Thank you for not hitting my kids."
- Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends: In "Seeing Red", before Terrence gets the idea to conjure an imaginary friend to bully Bloo while he bullies Mac, he decides that he needs pizza and accidentally conjures a talking slice, whom he promptly eats as it screams in agony.
- Gravity Falls:
- The third act of "Bottomless Pit" is Mabel telling a story (which Dipper reveals it's actually what happened before they fell in the titular pit) about how she exchanges Stan's dentures for magical ones that make him say the truth. However, he seems to know about that and makes his best to troll Mabel and make her regret her decision. A particular example is a moment where they watch TV and he randomly delivers a demotivational speech about life and death, putting Mabel in a Troubled Fetal Position and making Dipper cry:
Stan: Sometimes I wonder... is this all there is? Is life just some sort of horrific joke without a punchline, and we're all just biding our time until the sweet, sweet release of death?
- "Mabel's Guide to Colors": Mabel claims everything was black and white until a wizard invented color. To illustrate, she takes a picture from the Great Depression and draws said wizard, which she named Crandalf the Fabulous, on top of it, covering all the unemployed and miserable men in the picture with rainbows.
- In the Dipper's Guide to the Unexplained short "Lefty", Dipper and Mabel are trying to solve the mystery of a man in Gravity Falls who is always facing from the left side, even when doing this makes his life difficult. At the end of the short, Dipper spins him around to reveal that "Lefty" is a bunch of mouse-sized aliens piloting a robot. The burst comes in when the Aliens, their cover blown, proceed to shout "The time has come!" and commit mass suicide with glowing red capsules that cause them to disintegrate. One of them tries to chicken out, only taking the pill with great reluctance when another alien reminds him "You signed the oath!". After witnessing this and the robot breaking and catching fire in a crowded bowling alley, Dipper makes a note to burn the tape and forget it happened.
- The third act of "Bottomless Pit" is Mabel telling a story (which Dipper reveals it's actually what happened before they fell in the titular pit) about how she exchanges Stan's dentures for magical ones that make him say the truth. However, he seems to know about that and makes his best to troll Mabel and make her regret her decision. A particular example is a moment where they watch TV and he randomly delivers a demotivational speech about life and death, putting Mabel in a Troubled Fetal Position and making Dipper cry:
- In the House of Mouse short "How to Haunt a House", the Narrator arranges for Goofy to be killed off-screen by a car crash, which turns him into a ghost, and then orders Goofy to haunt a house and scare the living. At the end, when the ghostly Goofy finally succeeds at scaring his target Donald Duck, a terrified Donald runs outside, but only to also get killed off-screen by a car crash. Cue a ghostly Donald angrily chasing Goofy into the distance.
- Jellystone! has the occasional moment, as Jellystone is really a very dysfunctional town.
Wally Gator: [in a courthouse] I swear, the body was already dead when I found it!
- Little Bear: The whole premise of "Lucy's Okay" is that the main characters are pretending a doll died for fun.
- Martha Speaks: In "Alice Covers Up", when Mrs. Boxwood says that Alice's skin was dyed, Martha thinks Alice is going to die.
- The Mickey Mouse (2013) episodes "[1]" and "The Boiler Room" feature jokes with Mickey having a Hollywood Heart Attack, from shock in the former and because he outright orders his heart to stop beating in the latter.
- Milo Murphy's Law: "The Island of Lost Dakotas" reveals that Cavendish regularly dies during missions and Dakota has to repeatedly travel back in time prevent these accidents from occurring. A montage of Cavendish's deaths is Played for Laughs, including him being skeletonized after falling into lava and his head blowing up after neglecting to put on a space helmet.
- In a grander sense, the Christmas Episode of My Life as a Teenage Robot. What starts out as a normal Christmas special takes a turn for the dark when Jenny is knocked out, wakes up and has to escape captivity in the middle of nowhere. When she escapes back to Tremorton, every single person she ever knew and loved runs away in absolute terror, and even her own creator is drafting plans for her replacement. The one person who does still see her as a friend then reveals almost an entire year had passed in the time she was knocked out, and her captor took her over to terrorize the town. What makes it this trope is that it finishes with an "Everybody Laughs" Ending and then instantly snaps back to normal by the next episode like nothing ever happened.
- Bursts happen in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, of all shows:
- Whenever a character undergoes Sanity Slippage (most notably Pinkie Pie in "Party of One", Fluttershy in "The Best Night Ever", and Twilight Sparkle in "Lesson Zero"), the ensuing psychotic breaks from reality are often quite terrifying, yet they are all played for comedy.
- Discord seems to specialize in doing horrible things like plunging Equestria into an insane, chaotic Sugar Apocalypse and being Laughably Evil at the same time.
- He returns to this in "Keep Calm and Flutter On", wherein Fluttershy lets him stay at her house in the hope that she can reform him. When she leaves him alone with her pet bunny, Angel (who hasn't been buying any of his claims that he's turning good), Discord mocks Angel and confirms that he's been playing Fluttershy for a fool — all while wearing a pair of bunny slippers that look like they're made from actual dead rabbits.
- In "Make New Friends but Keep Discord", the courier who travels into Discord's dimension to deliver him his invitation then gets snatched up by some winged monster in the background and lifted off screen. He is never seen again.
- In "Lesson Zero", Twilight walks in on what looks like Fluttershy snapping a bear's neck, only for it to turn out to be a massage.
- In "Read it and Weep", the pony who accuses Rainbow Dash of stealing his slippers appears to be a cancer patient, and what Rainbow Dash thinks is an Angry Guard Dog chasing her while barking loudly is really a mentally ill mare who thinks she's a dog.
- "Hearts and Hooves Day" has two different moments of this. In the first instance, Sweetie Belle crashes a funeral, jumps on the back of the eulogizer (who is wearing a clerical collar), noogies him while singing that he's "too old" to be a suitable romantic candidate for Cheerilee, then jumps away. With a great big smile. While cheerful upbeat music plays. That the coffin is almost entirely off-screen and that the shot only lasts for two seconds is probably the only reason the show got away with it. Later in the episode, Apple Bloom's over-the-top Imagine Spot about what might go wrong if Cheerilee and Big Mac were to stop doing their jobs shows an apocalyptic famine-stricken Ponyville with Lily Valley emaciated like someone on the brink of starvation.
- In "Castle Mane-ia", in the scene where the ponies are panicking, Fluttershy sees what she thinks is Angel getting crushed by a falling pillar when it's clearly just a couple of rocks and leaves, and hastily tries lifting the pillar before Applejack jumps on top of it and flattens "Angel" some more.
- In "Pinkie Apple Pie", Goldie Delicious clears some cats to get at a book. She blows at the last cat... and it falls apart into dust.
- The Patrick Star Show:
- In "Neptune's Ball", we see a room full of old men sharing hunting stories. When GrandPat rallies them all out of the room, the camera lingers on one man who's not moving and hasn't spoken throughout the scene, heavily implying he died.
- "The Starry Awards" ends with Patrick, Squidina, and Granny Tentacles being blown up by a bomb and dying, only surviving due to the Reset Button.
- In "De-Pat-ment Store", Patrick sprays an old man with perfume, causing him to die and his spirit to leave his body. Lady Upturn comes across the old man's body lying in the middle of the store and calls for a clean-up.
- In "Slumber Party Stars", Squidina is sad when Pearl can't make it to the slumber party they planned, so her family tries to cheer her up. Cecil offers to watch a movie (which is turns out she doesn't like), Patrick offers pizza (which he ate all of), and GrandPat fluffs a pillow while saying he can put her out of her misery. When the slumber party with her family kicks off, Squidina admits she should have taken up GrandPat's offer.
- Some examples from Peppa Pig of all shows:
- "Pumpkin Party" has a scene where Madame Gazelle has no reflection, implying she's a Daywalking Vampire.
- In "The Zoo", Mr. Lion and Mrs. Crocodile say that they wish they could live on flowers, and Madame Gazelle looks nervous. Luckily, they just wanted to eat sandwiches.
- In "Tiny Land", Mr. Bull the roadworker is blocking the road, yet when the Pigs say they're going to the eponymous attraction, he lets them pass, saying that's "important". Yet, he doesn't let the police, fire brigade, or an ambulance pass.
- "Mountain Climbing" reveals that Grampy Rabbit once got stuck on top of a mountain and had to be saved by his daughter Miss Rabbit in her rescue helicopter. But in the Flashback, her response is just "Oh, Dad, not again!".
- In "Police Boat", Grampy Rabbit's boat starts to sink, and everyone acts like it's just a minor inconvenience.
- In "Dinosaur Party", Granny Pig and her friends LARP the extinction of the dinosaurs, using a big beach ball as the "asteroid"... but then Mr. Fox comes and thinks they're just having a party.
- Phineas and Ferb:
- Whenever Dr. Doofenshmirtz's Hilariously Abusive Childhood comes up.
- When the Flynn-Fletcher family go to the museum in "It's About Time!", there's a dog skeleton on display with a collar that says "Bucky". Phineas says that they had a dog named Bucky who got sick and went to live on kindly Old Man Simmons's farm. Their dad hurries them along to the next display, which is kindly Old Man Simmons.
- In "Traffic Cam Caper", Carl claims that O.W.C.A. lost Agent T the previous November, the implication being that Agent T was a turkey and was eaten for Thanksgiving dinner. Later, in "The Remains of the Platypus", Major Monogram brings up Agent T again when he draws a hand turkey, which horrifies Perry, causing Monogram to ask if it was too soon.
- In "Swiss Family Phineas", during Doofenshmirtz's explanation of how he wants to start a chain of "Institutes of Evilology", one of his student's lab tables has what is clearly the smoldering skeleton of an infant on it. Thankfully, this one is just an Imagine Spot.
- Popeye:
- The 1943 cartoon "Happy Birthdaze" ends with Popeye apparently murdering his Navy buddy Shorty (which is usually cut from modern TV prints).
- "You're a Sap, Mr. Jap" has the final scene where the Japanese admiral commits suicide by consuming gasoline and lit firecrackers.
- Rugrats:
- In "Special Delivery", the pit full of dead letters that Tommy almost falls in has the skeleton of a postal worker in it.
- This conversation from "Incident in Aisle Seven" when Lou and Tommy go to the grocery store:
Didi: I hope they come back with something besides forty boxes of Fudgy Ding-a-Ling Bars.
Stu: I hope they come back. - In "Angelica Breaks a Leg", while Dr. Doozer is looking for Angelica's file, not only does he take the wrong file, but he ignores a file that is very clearly marked "D.O.A" (as in dead on arrival).
- In "Autumn Leaves", when Chuckie says it's bad to give a fish bird food, Phil says, "So that's why Flippy had to go to the hospital in the potty".
- In "Chuckie vs. the Potty", Chuckie is scared to use the toilet, so he has a nightmare about being flushed down a giant toilet... with everyone acting like he's on death row, up to and including calling the toilet "the Chair".
- Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated: Mystery Inc. visits a monster's victim in the hospital, resulting in a comedically stressful interview. After they leave, we hear him flatline in the background, but the gang just exchange looks and leave.
- The Simpsons, despite being a Black Comedy in concept, is too idealistic to actually be considered one. Thus, the bursts of Black Comedy tend to be notable:
- "The War of the Simpsons", in part due to Early-Installment Weirdness, takes Homer's drunken antics in a way more serious direction than the usual silliness it usually plays out as.
- When Homer is passed out drunk, Dr. Hibbert reminds Marge to roll him over if she wants him to live through the night. When Marge thanks him, Hibbert reminds her that he said if, meaning he wouldn't blame Marge for straight up letting Homer die due to how awful he was behaving that night.
- When having a serious discussion with Homer in the car, Marge says that she hated knowing when her parents were fighting, so she puts on music to lighten the mood. Unfortunately, the song is a Trauma Button for Bart, Lisa, and Maggie, who grimly observe that their parents are fighting again. It's an oddly realistic moment, almost a Tear Jerker, that's uncomfortably real for any viewers who grew up in a bad home.
- "Homer's Enemy" gives a good idea of what the series would be like if it carried through on that conception — a Deconstruction based on a "real" character floundering in (and eventually getting killed by) the show's inherent silliness, it's considered one of the darkest episodes in the show's history. It culminates in Homer falling asleep at the man's funeral, talking in his sleep, and causing everyone attending the funeral to laugh.
- The trope is subverted in "King of the Hill" when the family are watching an action movie and a bad guy gets his neck snapped by the hero; Marge makes a joke about "breakneck speed" and laughs about it, and Bart flatly responds, "Mom, a man just died."
- "Homer vs. Dignity" is this in its entirety, but special mention goes to the infamous sequence of Homer getting molested by a panda.
- "Bart vs. Lisa vs. the Third Grade" and "Jazzy and the Pussycats" have jokes about bulimia, a serious eating disorder. In the former, we see Tom Brokaw vomiting into a trash can while despairing how "fat" he is. In the latter, Krusty exits an auditorium with "Now I'm gonna go vomit to keep my weight down." He laughs weakly before continuing "That's right, that's how Krusty does it."
- In "Today I Am a Clown", Homer strangles Bart on live TV. Dr. Hibbert is watching at home, and realizes that's why Bart has "all those broken tracheal bones", with Homer lying that he simply had a tight bow tie.
- In "Mommie Beerest", Homer yells at the attendant to stop a log flume ride so he can get off. This happens abruptly and sends one cart over the edge, killing a dad as his kid calls out for him.
- In "Regarding Margie", an amnesiac Marge is horrified that Homer strangles his son. Homer claims Bart is cool with it, and Bart weakly replies, "It hurts when I swallow" (implying that the all the strangling caused lasting physical harm).
- "G.I. (Annoyed Grunt)" has the banner "Army Recruitment Center: Suicidal Teens Welcome".
- In "Springfield Up", while Mr. Burns is away, Homer pretends that Burns Manor is his own to make himself look successful in a documentary he's in. When Burns comes back from vacation and sees Homer, what follows is a joke about physical child abuse, in a much less cartoony way than usual:
Homer: Please, Mr. Burns, pretend you work for me! You can have the boy, just don't beat him. (whispering) You can beat him, just don't leave marks.
- One instance of a very black moment in an otherwise pretty family-friendly episode is in "Love, Springfieldian Style", which includes a gag in which Goofy is led into the gas chamber at a dog pound, all the while struggling and protesting that he can walk on two legs, talk and wear clothes.
- "Papa Don't Leech" starts with a very detailed and dark sequence of Homer suffocating Grampa to death, and then remarking that it was a good dream.
- In "A Totally Fun Thing That Bart Will Never Do Again", Bart wakes up to find that the family suddenly has enough money to pay for the expensive cruise he wanted to go on. He assumes that his Deal with the Devil worked, and declares "Now to uphold my end of the bargain!", holding up a knife and calling out for the family cat before he's stopped.
- In "A Tree Grows in Springfield", Skinner describes prizes nobody wants from the school auction, like a spaghetti dinner with the Van Houtens. We then see a picture of Kirk and Luann arguing as Milhouse is about to begin slitting his wrists — Self-Harm jokes are already rare for the show, especially involving children.
- In "Keep Chalm and Gary On", when phones are banned from the school, Nelson is stopped after walking through a metal detector. It turns out he has a phone and a knife in his pocket . Chalmers takes the phone and lets him keep the knife.
- "The War of the Simpsons", in part due to Early-Installment Weirdness, takes Homer's drunken antics in a way more serious direction than the usual silliness it usually plays out as.
- South Park is usually more gross than grim, but then there's these three episodes:
- "Scott Tenorman Must Die" (and viewers can't even pretend it didn't happen, because Cartman likes bringing it up). It starts out normally enough, with the teenager Scott scamming Cartman out of money by convincing Cartman to buy Scott's pubic hair. Cartman soon tries getting a refund, but Scott either tricks him again or outright refuses. It continues to escalate until Cartman is intent on publicly humiliating Scott with absurd ploys, like training a pony to bite off Scott's penis. Scott keeps outsmarting Cartman at every turn, until the climax, where Cartman reveals the cartoonish plot he told his friends about (that they told Scott about) was actually a misdirection, and Cartman's actual ploy, which he only reveals after it succeeds, was to kill Scott's parents, mix their flesh into chili, and feed it to Scott. To take this to 11, in "Episode 201", it turns out Scott's father was also Cartman's father, meaning Cartman killed his own dad and fed him to his half-brother.
- "The China Probrem", specifically the B-plot dealing with the boys' reaction to Indiana Jones being raped (metaphorically and literally) by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. The rape scenes are surprisingly graphic, the witnesses are shown to be traumatized, and the whole situation is played seriously, all of which emphasize how ridiculous the metaphor is.
- "Stanley's Cup" is particularly infamous for this. The episode is a merciless Deconstruction of Sports Stories, where at the end a pee-wee hockey team coached by Stan gets beaten into a bloody pulp by a team of adults, one of the children says to Stan that he hates him, Stan's father's dream is destroyed, and a child who was rooting for the team dies of cancer. The point is that children trained by Stan were just an Opposing Sports Team in another team's story. Seems like this was too much even for the show's usual target audiences.
- SpongeBob SquarePants:
- In "Sandy's Rocket", Sandy initially refuses to let SpongeBob ride with her on her rocket trip to the moon after he apparently caused a mishap with her helicopter that led to the deaths of many civilians, evidenced by a large graveyard outside her treedome.
- In "Bubble Buddy", the titular character, Bubble Buddy, is left by SpongeBob to dig a fish out of the sand. He doesn't, and the fish drowns when high tide comes in. What suddenly makes it more horrifying is that it turns out that Bubble Buddy was, in fact, alive and sentient all along. What suddenly makes it less horrifying is that 1) the said fish's ghost seems to be happy that he "experienced high tide", 2) the fish is alive in later episodes.
- In "Band Geeks":
- Squidward is leading his band on a march through town and demands that the two flag twirlers spin their flags even faster. They spin hard enough to turn their flags into propellers and propel themselves into a blimp, which explodes. One of the members of the band plays Taps on a trumpet while Squidward lays on the ground and everyone else mourns.
- During the "Sweet Victory" scene, Squilliam is so dismayed by how much Squidward's band kills it with their performance that he has a heart attack and has to be carried away by a stretcher. The scene is Played for Laughs, with Squidward mockingly waving him away.
- In "Krusty Love", Mr. Krabs learns that Mrs. Puff is actually single, and asks what happend to Mr. Puff. There's a live-action Cutaway Gag of someone turning on a lamp made from a dried-out pufferfish, and then it cuts back to Spongebob telling Mr. Krabs "She doesn't like to talk about it."
- In "The Fry Cook Games", Patrick botches an attempt to pole vault over a giant deep-fryer and accidentally throws the oil onto a portion of the audience, turning them into fish sticks. A vendor then begins selling them for a dollar each.
- "Nasty Patty" features SpongeBob and Mr. Krabs believing they've accidentally killed a health inspector with a tainted Krabby Patty, before spending the rest of the episode trying to hide the body. What increases the comedic aspect is the fact that the health inspector is actually still alive and just keeps getting knocked unconscious by SpongeBob and Mr. Krabs' antics, with the latter two none the wiser.
- In "Rock-A-Bye-Bivalve", SpongeBob feeds a sentient, talking worm to a scallop as it begs for its life.
Talking Worm: Hello, sea creatures, I bring you greetings from Apple World! [gets grabbed and lowered into scallop's mouth] Huh? Wait! We will bury you! [gets eaten]
- In "Chimps Ahoy", SpongeBob uses one of Sandy's inventions, a helmet that lets you talk to nuts, to talk to a peanut. Sandy then uses another invention to turn the nut into coffee, its agonized screaming now being audible. SpongeBob is mortified as Taps plays again.
- In "No Hat for Pat", Mr. Krabs gives Patrick a job holding a sign directing people to the Krusty Krab, but Patrick directs a guy to the Chum Bucket instead. Shortly after, it's implied that the guy died from eating Plankton's food because four more fish come onscreen carrying a coffin.
- In "Are You Happy Now?", Squidward realizes he has never had a happy moment and sinks into depression. As SpongeBob frantically tries to call his friend, Squidward sticks his head in the oven...to get a batch of brownies out, but baking didn't work to cheer him up. He muses "I just can't seem to get happy. Maybe this will help..." and he hangs a rope from the ceiling...to put up a bird cage.
- In "Out of the Picture", the art expert mimes hanging himself when explaining that Squidward's paintings would be worth more if he was dead, which is pretty dark for a kid's cartoon.
- "Krusty Kleaners" managed to get away with a suicide joke in the form of SpongeBob committing seppuku by using his spatula about halfway through the episode.
- "Patrick the Mailman" has a joke about a little girl getting hit with a package and thrown off a bridge. She opens a package and it's a raft, saving her. Then she's about to plummet off a cliff and into sharp rocks, and the scene cuts away.
- "We ♥ Hoops" has a scene with a bunch of tricycling children falling into a massive chasm after SpongeBob and Patrick push the bridge away. Thankfully, they're shown to be okay later in the episode.
- In "UpWard", when an art museum employee has all his exhibits disliked by Lady Upturn, he throws himself into a pit of fire.
- In "Wiener Takes All", the robot about to turn Squidward into a robot tells him to "lie back and think of weenies", referencing a phrase usually used in the context of non-consenting sex.
- In "Jeffy T's Prankwell Emporium", a scene is set up like Squidward is about to smother his father to death with a pillow.
- Steven Universe:
- In "So Many Birthdays", the gems' attempts to make Steven feel younger border between hilarious and devastatingly sad, especially Pearl desperately crying while doing a Pie in the Face act, dressed as a clown.
- In "Joking Victim", Sadie tells Steven that they don't make their own donuts at Big Donut ever since "the Accident", and it pans over to show a scorched section of wall with a human silhouette outlined. It then abruptly cuts to Sadie getting ready to show Steven the Big Donut training video.
- "Steven and the Stevens" veers into this: Steven ends up creating a bunch of time-displaced clones of himself in order to staff his musical band, but there's eventually a dispute between them and they all create more clones and fight each other. Future Steven ends up breaking the device he'd been using to time travel, causing himself and all his clones to rather graphically de-materialize right in front of his past self... after which we then cut to Steven and the Crystal Gems singing the chipper song he was practicing with his band earlier in the episode, with very different lyrics.
Steven: Steven and the Crystal Gems, come on now, don't be shy / I learned to stay true to myself by watching myself die.
- Amethyst hoards huge piles of miscellaneous junk in her room, and in the episode "Reformed", she finds a gas mask among her assorted stuff. She cheerily uses said gas mask to pretend to be an elephant... then removes a human skull from inside it, while declaring that "there's a prize inside!"
- After Peridot tries to give Lapis a pool as a peace offering in "Barn Mates", Lapis explains to her the anguish of her time spent trapped underwater in a creepy serious monotone.
"It was an endless crushing darkness, wet and bleak and suffocating. Water was the tomb I lived in for those months."
- In "Steven Floats", when Steven is stuck floating in the sky, having an Imagine Spot about not being able to get back down in time to get the first new donut of the day:
Steven: They'll say: "Hey where's Steven? We saved a donut for him." But they won't see me, because I'm in the sky. And then, they'll feed my donut to a dog. And then I'll die.
[Steven's bones fall on the ground; Sadie picks up his skull (that still has hair)]
Sadie: Alas, poor Steven! I knew him well. - A sleep-deprived Mr. Smiley, trying to man every location in Funland, in "Too Short to Ride".
Mr. Smiley: I guess you could say we're a little fun-derstaffed.
Steven: Hah, I get the pun.
Mr. Smiley: I'm glad you see the humor in it, Steven. 'Cause I haven't seen a bed in six days. - In "Gem Harvest", Steven uses his powers to turn an ordinary pumpkin into a doglike creature which is loyal to him. Afterwards, he shows off an alternate, more mundane method of giving a pumpkin a face: namely, turning it into a jack-o-lantern. The newly-animate Pumpkin watches, horrified, as Steven carves one of its kin with a knife and removes the normal pumpkin's innards; Steven is completely oblivious to how disturbing this otherwise-normal action is in context, and his obliviousness is played for humor the entire time, even as Pumpkin flees from him in terror and opts to stay with Peridot and Lapis instead.
- Thomas & Friends: In one episode, the viaduct is under repair, making main line trains late to the junction. Henry criticizes Thomas for complaining, and Thomas leaves with a fairly dark zinger.
Henry: If we hurried across the viaduct it might collapse, and then you'd have no passengers at all. What would you do then?
Thomas: Run my train on time, for one thing! - In the first episode of Trolls: The Beat Goes On!, the Bergens bring the Trolls a Troll-shaped piñata for their party, which horrifies them. Not helping their case is that instead of candy, the piñata is full of sausage, which when pulled out of its stomach resembles intestines.
Other
- One would never expect to find Black Comedy in Boy Scout skits (well, current and former Boy Scouts definitely would expect it, but others probably would not), which is why "Fire" and "Bridge", among several others, stand out among the others.
