A chronological/topical survey of black comedy gems
Dec 23 '02 (Updated Dec 26 '02)
The Bottom Line Antidotes to Christmas cheer
Black comedies take grim subjects (mayhem, murder, marriage, nuclear annihilation) as occasions for chortling. I think the forefather of black comedy was Aristophanes. The only one of his plays that has been filmed seems to be "Lysistrata"—four times, though I haven't seen any of them.
The Roman master was Plautus, who lacks screen credits, though several of his plays (particularly "Miles Gloriosu") underlie "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" which wasted the great Buster Keaton, but had an appropriately devious Phil Silvers as the slave manipulator.
The oldest surviving (if only in fragments) novel, Petronius Arbiter's Satyricon was filmed by Federico Fellini. The movie is visually striking (as are the two male leads), but not very funny. (I'd say the same of "Juliet of the Spirits" and " 8 1/2").
Black comedy is primarily a modernist genre. On film before World War II, subversive humor broke out within horror films directed by James Whale (who is the subject of "Gods and Monsters" which has more than incidental black humor) in "The Old Dark House" (1932) and "The Bride of Frankenstein" (1935), both starring Boris Karloff. (I don't think that Peter Bogdonovich's "Targets" is a black comedy, but Karloff's part of it is.)
Vincent Price's burlesqued horror movies of Edgar Allen Poe stories (The Raven, The Masque of the Red Death. The House of Usher, etc.) produced by Roger Corman derive from Whale's horror comedies, though the real masterpieces of B-mayhem produced by Corman are satires of 1950s conventions and phenomena. Jack Nicholson's masochistic dental patient and a musical remake have made "Little Shop of Horrors" (1960) better known, but I think "A Bucket of Blood" (1959) is at least as funny, maybe because art tastemakers are more absurd than florists. Although Anthony Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange is predominantly a political satire, Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film is more in the tradition of black comedy mayhem (a real "horroshow" to borrow a term from Alex).
The Nobel Prize-winning master of black comedy was Samuel Beckett, a number of whose plays have been filmed (mostly tv versions). There have been tv versions of various plays by Eugène Ionesco, too. I haven't seen the 1973 movie version of "Rhinoceros" with Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, and Karen Black. It sounds like the film conception was "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." Especially the first (1956 Don Siegel) version of "Body Snatchers" might be considered black comedy, though, like most of the Roger Corman flix, it was not marketed that way.
The British master of black comedy on the boards was Joe Orton. There's a not-very-good movie version of "Loot" with Lee Remick and a more entertaining version of "Entertaining Mr. Sloane" (1970) that segues into the serial killer comedies.
Murder, most foul
Although it seems too genial to be a black comedy, priority here has to be given to Frank Capra's (1944) film of the popular play "Arsenic and Old Lace." A befuddled Cary Grant (and did anyone ever do befuddlement more charmingly than Grant?) buries the bodies of lonely older men dispatched by his aunts Josephine Hull and Jean Adair.
Charlie Chaplin's second talking picture, "Monsieur Verdoux" (1947) was a commercial flop, and is not a great film, but provided Chaplin a change of pace role (his Hitler parody in "The Great Dictator" seems too genial for that to qualify as "black comedy"; similarly Ernst Lubitsch's great "To Be or Not To Be" with Jack Benny and Carole Lombard is sillier than dark.)
Alec Guiness playing the roles of a killer and the elders he kills to inherit a title in "Kind Hearts and Coronets" (1949) seems a little too kindly, too. In the more sardonic "Ladkillers" he leads a gang of bumbling thieves who cannot kill even one seemingly defenseless old lady.
No one is likely to find the gigolo (Tony LoBianco) and an obese woman (Shirley Stoler) in "The Honeymoon Killers" (1970) too charming. It is one of the very blackest of black comedies (as in despairing).
In contrast, John Waters even when he is trying to be heartless is kind-hearted. It seems to me that he has an affection for his most outrageous characters, first in the small-budget pictures with Divine (e.g., Pink Flamingoes) and in his own serial killer comedy with Kathleen Turner as "Serial Mom" (1994).
Not-so sunny suburbua
"Serial Mom" invites a segue into black comedies of middle class families (and another backtrack). Jean Renoir's "Boudu Saved from Drowning" 1932) is a foundational work in this subgenre (updated and moved to "Down and Out in Beverly Hills." In those movies, a homeless person is rescued and then can't be detached again. In Luis Bruñuel's "Exterminating Angel" (1962) no one can leave a dinner party. (Most of Bruñuel's films are filled with black humor, though Catherine Deneuve's dourness undercuts some of the later ones (Virdiana, Belle de Jour).
Black humor is a subordinate element in Douglas Sirk's amped-up (if color can be amped up...) melodramas. For me the most chilling is the 1956 "There's Always Tomorrow" (in black-and white) in which Fred MacMurray's children break up his relationship with Barbara Stanwyck. (The tv set that Jane Wyman's children give her as a consolation prize for giving up Rock Hudson in All That Heaven Allows" is right in there, too).
The first part of Stanley Kubrick's (1962) "Lolita" is a black comedy about a dysfunctional family. Mick Nichols's superb (1966) film of Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf?" and Tamara Jenkins's (1998) "Slums of Beverly Hills" seem to me to focus to considerable extents on class (and If "All That Heaven Allows" were a comedy, it could fit here, too).
"The Adams Family" (1992) and "Adams Family Values" (1993) seem to me a little too eager to please. I'd classify them as campy parodies of black comedies.
The justly celebrated recent masterpieces in this subgenre are Sam Medes's (1999) "American Beauty" and (1998) Todd Solondz's "Happiness"--and many episodes of "Six Feet Under," which like "American Beauty" is written by Allan Ball.
Tony Richardson's (1965) "The Loved One" also centers on the funeral business. The funeral director, Mr. Joyboy, was allegedly the late, great Rod Steiger's favorite part. Immortality recurs as the theme of Robert Zemeckis's (1992) "Death Becomes Her" with Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep as rivals.
Mordant humor in the west and south
There is black humor in Sergio Leone's Clint Eastwood westerns (Fistful of Dollars; For a Few Dollars More; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly), but it is more pervasive in his last western, "A Fistful of Dynamite" (also known as "Duck, You Sucker") which also starred Steiger along with the dapper James Coburn.
Burt Lancaster injected some black humor in the westerns he made (Vera Cruz, The Professionals, Ulzana's Raid). There are comic elements in many classic westerns, but the only other westerns that seem to me to be a black comedies are Joseph Mankiewicz's "There Was a Crooked Man" (1970) and two comedies with black leads, "The Skin Game" (1971) with Lou Gossett and James Garner—a black comedy harking back to Plautus, and Mel Brooks's (1974) "Blazing Saddles" with Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder.
(At the risk of seeming to be free associating, it is fairly easy to take "In the Heat of the Night" (1967) as a black comedy, also with a black lead: Sidney Poitier sees the absurdity of his position and Rod Steiger eventually does, too.)
I think that "Traffic" would have been better as a black (and brown) comedy. I see "The Fluffer," "Requiem for a Dream," and "Naked Lunch" as drug black comedies. Ellen Burstyn's refrigerator seems to me to dwell in the same world as the plant in "Little Shop of Horrors."
Paul Bartel's "Eating Raoul" (1982) harks back to "Arsenic and Old Lace," centering on the problem of corpse disposal. ("Sweeney Todd" provides a similar solution."
To die in absurdity
Warfare, or at least the idiocy of commanders, is a recurrent site for black comedy," though adaptations of "Oh What a Lovely War" (1969) about the First World War and Catch-22 (1970) about the second were disappointing. "How I Won the War" (1967) was also disappointing, "Mediterraneo" (1990) won an Oscar but is very mild (silver rather than black?). Seemingly by default, the best black comedies about a world war are Preston Sturges's (1944) "Hail the Conquering Hero" and Blake Edwards's "The Americanizaton of Emily (1964) both far removed from the front lines. The great black comedy of the Korean War is set much closer to the front lines and certainly amid the carnage: Robert Altman's (1970) "M*A*S*H."
However, there are at least two great black comedies about war: last year's Academy Award winning foreign film "No Man's Land" set in the front lines of the war in Bosnia and Stanley Kubrick's (1964) comedy of species annihilation from the Cold War, "Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb."
"Dr. Stangelove" is, undoubtedly, more political satire than war movie. I was underwhelmed by Peter Sellers's idiot taken as a savant in "Being There" (1979), will reiterate that "Traffic" should have been made as a black comedy (especially Michael Douglas's drug czar) and mention three other black comedies I remember as very funny: James Coburn as "The President's Analyst" (1967), Judy Davis's Australian Stalinist in "Children of the Revolution" (1999). Reese Witherspoon's Nixonian class president candidate in "Election" also 1999; if she's Nixon, who's Matthew Broderick? Clark Clifford, perhaps?). Mankewicz's "There Was a Crooked Man" (1970) might also fit here, especially Henry Fonda's character. I'm not sure that Billy Wilder's (1961) "One, Two, Three" is dark enough to qualify, but it's a very funny Cold War comedy. Alec Guiness's vacuum-cleaner merchant taken for a spy, "Our Man in Havana" (1959) is suitably dark and very funny.
Not-so-nice people in the entertainment business
It seems there should be more black comedies about staging plays and making movies. Mel Brooks's (1968) "The Producers" struck me (then) as only mildly amusing (I much prefer "The Young Frankenstein," which is back in the original black comedy subgenre). Billy WIider's (1950) "Sunset Boulevard" is considerably less silly and more mordant. It also was adapted into a musical. I'm surprised that Robert Aldrich's (1962) "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" has not become a musical. Perhaps this is because there is no one to compete with the memory of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis?
There is black humor in "The Front Page," which has been filmed three times, the most recent by Billy Wilder. The great black comedies about the fourth estate, however, are Wilder's "Ace in the Hole" (1954, also known as "The Big Carnival") and the 1957 "Sweet Smell of Success" from a script by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, with a cringing Tony Curtis and an overbearing Burt Lancaster. For telejournalism there is Gus Van Sant's (1995) "To Die For," with breakout roles for Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix. And there's even a romance novelist (Meryl Streep's channeling of Barbara Cartland) in the 1989 film of Fay Weldon's She Devil directed by Susan Seidelman and costarring Roseanne Barr in the title role.
Obsessions, most dangerous
For erotic obsession, the premier black comedies are Preston Sturges's (1948) "Unfaithfully Yours" with Rex Harrison as a symphony conductor imagining offing those he imagines have cuckolded him and Stanley Kubrick's (1962) with James Mason floundering in pursuit of Sue Lyons and Peter Sellers. There are inferior, less funny remakes of both (with Dudley Moore and Jeremy Irons, respectively.
The HAL and Dave part (for me the best part) of Kubrick's (1968) "2001" rates mention, though not fitting elsewhere in this survey. Also the 1977 hockey carnage masterpiece "Slapshot" directed by George Roy Hill and the 1979 football movie "North Dallas Forty."
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The envelopes, please?
Laying out all these examples has suggested to me that the golden age for black comedies on screen ran from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s. The actors who recurred are Alec Guinness, Burt Lancaster, James Coburn, Rod Steiger (also flamboyant in "No Way to Treat a Lady"), James Garner, and Peter Sellers (the pink panther films are too farcical to qualify as black comedy). The only actresses who recurs are Meryl Streep and Divine (but consideration should be given Kathleen Turner for "War of the Roses").
Among directors, Stanley Kubrick's name recurs (Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, Clockwork Orange). There are additional films by Billy Wilder (Stalag-17, The Apartment, Kiss Me Stupid), Joseph Mankiewicz (The Honey Pot, Sleuth, and in my view Suddenly Last Summer) that are as good as many of the films I've mentioned.
Rather than rank ten, I've decided to select one film from each of my black comedy subgenres (* for those about which I have written epinions reviews):
forerunners: Bride of Frankenstein
horror: A Bucket of Blood
murder: The Ladykillers
middle class families: Happiness
saintliness: Simon the Desert (dir. Luis Bruñuel)
virgin birth: The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (dir. Preston Sturges)
western: A Fistful of Dynamite*
race: The Skin Game*
politics: Election* (see also command structure!)
war (front lines) No Man's Land*
war (command structure): Dr. Strangelove
entertainment industry: Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
science fiction: 2001
sports: Slapshot
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