Just at the height of nuclear anxiety in the 1960s, the dark comedy movie was born, transforming deep, fearful worries into morbid humor. Though the nature of gallows humor or dark comedy has been around forever as a way to cope with the absurdities and cruelties of life, it’s often said that Stanley Kubrick officially introduced the dark comedy movie genre in the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
The project tells the story of a mentally unbalanced US Air Force General who insists on a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Beyond the General’s behavior, the film follows the US President and his team’s attempts to prevent the start of a nuclear war. If the plot sounds serious, that’s because it started out that way. According to an article by Visual Memory, as Kubrick was developing the script he would actively “throw away insights because [he] was afraid the audience would laugh.” Soon after, Kubrick recognized that these “incongruous bits were closer to the truth than anything else [he] was able to imagine.” With Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick invented the “nightmare comedy,” an account of true nuclear anxiety without excluding “the banal, the absurd, and the incongruous.” The image of a cowboy hooting and hollering as he rides a massive bomb that will initiate the nuclear holocaust has practically become synonymous with America, or its least its cinema.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
Columbia Pictures
The black comedy truly touched on the fact that scary, complex, and unpredictable world events could be viewed and considered through an absurd lens. It was clear that audiences were craving this perspective since Dr. Strangelove received rave reviews. Today, the film maintains 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and John Patterson of The Guardian comments that “all the gods before whom the America of the stolid, paranoid 50s had genuflected” including the Bomb, the Pentagon, and others, “went into the woodchipper and never saw the same respect again.” Using dark humor, the film was able to reflect truth arguably better than with seriousness; as The New Yorker titles an article, “Almost Everything in Dr. Strangelove Was True.”
Since Kubrick’s embrace of dark comedy, defined as a comedic style that makes fun of usually taboo subjects, the genre has maintained its popularity through the years with acclaimed films like Monty Python’s Life of Brian or Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit. Here is exactly how the 1960s created the dark comedy movie.
Dark Comedy Movies and the 1960s
Gramercy Pictures
According to Studio Binder, before the emergence of dark comedy in film, Surrealist theorist Andre Breton discussed the new genre in 1935 when he interpreted the works of Jonathan Swift. Swift wrote a satirical essay called A Modest Proposal in which he suggests “the Irish could solve their economic problems by selling their children to the wealthy as food.” Later, in the 1960s, an anthology of short stories by Edward Albee, Thomas Pynchon, and J.P. Donleavy called Black Humour featured exclusively dark comedy. So, why the 1960s? The nuclear threat was special in that it suggested the annihilation and destruction of an entire nation. Everyone was in danger indefinetly. Stanley Kubrick told Entertainment Weekly that “the nightmare themes portrayed in Dr. Strangelove would be with us as long as we had nuclear weapons.”
One of the best ways to cope with this reality according to Kubrick and other filmmakers and authors is to consider the situation through the lens of dark humor. According to human behavior expert Claire Brummel, many people use dark humor to comfortably express their “full spectrum of emotion.” Instead of only feeling grief and anxiety, with dark comedy people are able to feel amusement and cheer. After Kubrick’s first contribution to the genre, other classic dark comedy movies followed such as Mel Brook’s legendary The Producers (featuring its iconic “Springtime For Hitler” medley), Sidney Lumet’s Network in the 70s, and the Coen brothers’ Fargo in the 90s.
Dark Comedy Movies Today
Fox Searchlight Pictures
Although the 1960s introduced nuclear anxiety, the decades after there was an emphasis on other human worries including violence and death, political corruption and climate apocalypse, racial and sexual stereotypes, and war and terrorism. There were lots of concerns to make comedy out of. Despite dark comedy’s sometimes controversial presence, it is still a useful genre for encouraging conversation and, as Brummel says, feeling the full spectrum of emotion. When Taika Waititi spoke to Complex about mixed reactions to Jojo Rabbit, Waititi praised the fact that the film wasn’t “easily digestible” and sparked conversations beyond the viewing, even winning him an Oscar for Best Screenplay. Waititi wanted the movie to “have a life outside of the cinema” and succeeded.
Another example of modern dark comedy is Martin Scorsese’s film The Wolf of Wall Street. Despite the grim reality that the film’s characters live in and their disturbing appetites for sex and drugs, the film makes fun of the attitudes of these greedy Wall Street stockbrokers, utilizing black comedy to critique capitalism and the 2008 financial crisis (just as The Big Short did so masterfully).
Despite its controversial role, dark comedy is essential for processing difficult situations and events. As Stanley Kubrick did with Dr. Strangelove, dark comedies present sensitive subjects without limitations. The anxiety during the 1960s opened up a new kind of humor and a new way to think about sensitive subjects. The genre introduced a new kind of way to process inevitable dark realities and continues to function in movies that come out today. Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is avaliable for streaming on Netflix.
