Black comedies have a dark and cynical tone characteristic of comedies that became popular during the 1940s, with films like Arsenic and Old Lace (1944). The plots of these films usually revolve around some grotesque, violent, and taboo subject matter. They became popular again in the 1960s when Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove (1964) and Mike Nichols's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) were successful both at the box office and with critics. Some recent examples include Robert Altman's The Player (1992), Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994) and Barry Sonnenfeld's Get Shorty (1995).

Using laughter as a formidable defense against the absurd complexities of modern life, black comedy is essentially entertainment as survival tactic, injecting humor into situations that might otherwise be unbearable. Nothing is sacred in a genre that dares to poke fun at the unthinkable, and black comedy gleefully violates taboos with abandon. Although grim humor has been a part of movies since the early silent era , the genre didn't begin to define itself until the late 1940s and 1950s, when British comedies—in what would become a continuing and popular tradition—used elegant style and literate writing to cross previously well-guarded moral boundaries.
A classic case in point is Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), in which a disgruntled aristocrat sets out to eliminate the relatives who block his inheritance to a dukedom, all eight of whom are played by Sir Alec Guinness in a memorable multiple-role performance. With shocking wit and amoral detachment, the film dared to suggest that murder can be fun, skewering upper-crust British snobbery while leading viewers to sympathize with a heartless killer. Sir Alec Guinness would later star in The Ladykillers (1955), another British classic featuring a seemingly harmless old woman who skillfully dispatches a band of bumbling robbers. Both films attracted controversy for what some pereceived as a lapse of commonn decency, but black comedy was officially here to stay. Among American black comedies, Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and Clockwork Orange (1971) have become classics.

British comedy never got much blacker than it did in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), which lampooned the legend of King Arthur to draw humor from the black plague, witch hunts, graphic dismemberment, foul bodily functions and a variety of similarly distasteful subjects.
Monty Python veteran Terry Gilliam continued the tradition of irreverence in his own films, particularly the brilliant Brazil (1985), where Gilliam's unique sense of the absurd was well-suited to combat the Kafkaesque bureaucratic madness of a future dystopia.

Hollywood has produced a number of memorable black comedies, including What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), with its portraits of fading Hollywood glamor; the outrageousness of war as depicted in M*A*S*H (1970); the inventively twisted pursuit of suicide in Harold and Maude (1972); and the confusion between movies and reality in The Stunt Man (1980) and Get Shorty.

Not surprisingly, some of the blackest American comedies have come from the fringes of independent filmmaking, where humor is less confined by popular trends and commercial consideration. Maverick director Paul Bartel gained instant cult status with Eating Raoul (1982), which took a deadpan approach to it droll plot involving serial killing, robbery, and nonchalant cannibalism. John Waters moved into the studio-supported mainstream without compromising his uniquely twisted sensibilities. His black comedy Serial Mom (1994) maintained the director's reputation for breaking taboos with its attack on "family values" and suburban conformity.

The Coen brothers have also demonstrated a wealth of macabre wit and visual flair, particularly in Blood Simple (1984), Barton Fink (1991), and The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). On a more rebellious level, Michael Lehman's Heathers (1989) took on the touchy subject of teen suicide with its scathing satire of peer pressure and high-school status-seekers. These titles offer a small sample of a genre which offers an antidote to priggishness often invoked in the name of "decency" and "good taste."