Black Comedy

For today’s blog, I was inspired by my latest movie-going, where I went to see Burn After Reading. Let me start out by saying, that I thoroughly enjoyed the Coen Brothers’ creation as it not only had an unbelievable all-star cast, but it was also hilarious. Nonetheless, Burn After Reading has not gotten as much praise as I thought it would from friends and critics alike. For the critics, it’s understandable for their distaste since it followed the Coen Brothers’ 2007, Academy Award-winning film No Country For Old Men; it’s hard to top a movie winning four different Academy Awards including Best Picture. On the other hand, my friends did not enjoy the movie mostly because they do not enjoy or understand the concept of black comedy.

Black comedy is a sub-genre of comedy, involving irony, where topics that are typically considered as taboo are handled in comedic and humorous ways. These taboo topics can cover anything from death to rape to extra marital affairs. In Burn After Reading, taboo topics such as death, murder, extra marital affairs, and alcoholism were all covered, but I will not give any specific examples from this film since the movie is new and some people haven’t even gotten the chance to see it yet. Instead, I will use another well-known Coen Brothers’ film.

The 1996 Coen Brothers’ film, Fargo, won two Academy Awards, and like Burn After Reading, it consisted of an all-star cast revolving around the idea of black comedy. In the movie, a man named Jerry Lundegaard is in over his head in debts, and so devises a plan to hire two men to kidnap his wife and demand a ransom of $1 million from her wealthy father. Jerry does his best to play along with the planned kidnapping and has his father-in-law fooled, but soon, things start getting out of hand. The two men Jerry hired, Gaear and Carl, are complete idiots, and so the kidnapping results in a lot of bloodshed with multiple comedic and ironic scenes along the way.

One prime example of a black comedic scene in the movie Fargo, is when one of the perpetrators, Gaear, is caught attempting to dispose the body of his partner, Carl through a wood chipper. He attempts to get rid of the body inconspicuously, but the noise of the wood chipper and the blood being sprayed all over the snow give him away. An officer, named Gunderson, finds Gaear, and simply points to her badge to explain her intentions over the noise of the wood chipper. Immediately, Gaear takes off running leaving the body hanging out of the wood chipper, and falls flat on his face in the snow. Normally, the idea of a body being trashed through a wood chipper is not at all funny but rather frightening; however, in this case, Gaear is portrayed as a bumbling idiot as he trips and falls adding comedic relief to the scene. Of course, there is more irony to the murdering of Carl, but if you really wish to know, I highly recommend this movie.

From Fargo to Burn After Reading, the Coen Brothers are excellent directors and writers when it comes to articulating black comedy. People’s dislike for their films usually revolves around the misunderstanding of the sick twisted ways of the humor. It’s a hard concept to appreciate because when can murder or marital affairs and such ever be funny? But as shown through these two Coen Brothers’ films, as well as many more like the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, it can be done, and you just have to be in the right mindset to fully value the ideas of black comedy.