When (why, and how) tragedy becomes comedy – 20 scenes from cinema that induce tears of laughter instead of sorrow...
Ahead hefty enough spoilers for us to warn you about them for: The Dark Knight, The Thing, Antichrist, Snowpiercer, The Wicker Man, Lawless, Brothers, Seven and Crash.
There are mild spoilers for the other films mentioned.
Sometimes, all you want to do is settle down to watch a film you know is going to make you laugh – some of us head towards the comedy section of our DVD shelves, while others bust out Titanic to laugh when the guy falls into the propeller. If you’ve ever found yourself in the second group laughing at violent death in the movies, it’s not your fault – perhaps the scene making you hysterical is overwrought and hasn’t earned the emotional response the director was trying so hard for. Or an actor is serving up a performance of the thickest, richest ham.
Perhaps the editing is too abrupt, or you’re like me and “HA!” during sex scenes because you’re extremely immature. Sometimes the plot is going to such a horrible place the only way you can deal with it is to start howling with laughter. Or maybe it’s funny because you’re a psychopath, I don’t know.
Here are 20 films and scenes that are supposed to be intensely serious or tragic, but hit the comedy side of the BAFTA mask instead – we’ve got (failed) attempts to tackle degenerative brain conditions respectfully, sudden death, addiction battles, and there are two appearances from Brad Pitt, so brace yourself if you’re easily offended by such things (to be clear: it's not the subject matter that we're laughing at here - there are some serious topics in the examples below that we'd never make light of - rather how it's been dealt with on screen). I love watching Hollywood do well, but I also love to watch when it fumbles this badly. Let’s start on a fairly light note…
20: Acrobatic vehicular manslaughter in Meet Joe Black
*Faint sound of engines revving*
So, picture it: you’re working on Meet Joe Black. Your film revolves around Heartthrob Deluxe of the '90s, Brad Pitt. You’ve got him baby-blue eyed and floppy blonde fringed, suntanned and six-packed. You’ve been careful to frame him in soft focus and lingering close-ups for your audience, you’ve introduced him as the film’s protagonist – we’re supposed to care about him, and root for him throughout his journey.
Then you launch that dreamboat over the top of a speeding cab in a car crash like a ragdoll. Twice. If more schmaltzy romance films had random slapstick violence thrown in like this, maybe I’d watch more of them.
19: Kurt and Co. charge Wilfred Brimley in The Thing
Countdown to old guy getting a smack in the chops – five, four…
At this point in the alien-parasite thriller things have got pretty tense – there’s a chance most of the isolated crew are infected, and Brimley’s Blair is tearing up the station in an effort to stop the alien getting beyond the base and into the world outside. How do you stop a crazed work colleague from ranting, waving a gun around, and shooting at everyone?
If you’re Kurt Russell’s MacReady, you and your pals skip the reasoning, and just charge him with a fold-out table and rabbit-punch him in the head. The abrupt ‘old man gets double-tap to the face’ always gets at least one rewind in my abode – it’s just a house rule now.
18: Let’s play ‘Orgasm or Parkinson’s?’ with Love & Other Drugs
“Oh God, this film really sucks”
A thoughtful exploration of the mental and physical effects ailing health can have on a woman through the various stages of her life, as well as its cruel work on the man who loves her… is a movie called Amour directed by Michael Haneke, Iris by Richard Eyre, or Away from Her by Sarah Polley. Love & Other Drugs, however, is the Edward Zwick film that took a best-selling book about ethics in the US pharmaceutical industry (Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman by Jamie Reidy) and turned it into an Anne Hathaway/Jake Gyllenhaal romance + Parkinson’s ‘comedy’.
Tacking on a half-baked ‘Surprise! Your girlfriend has Parkinson’s!’ plot (that wasn’t in the original book) to add drama to your romcom/give your male lead something to umm and ahh about is disrespectful to people suffering with the disease, and makes for a bizarre and uncomfortable watch for everyone. What tips the experience over to incredulous laughter is the “Is she having an orgasm in this sex scene, or is she having a Parkinson’s-related tremor – oh, she’s having both” moment mid-movie. Something this terrible deserves a sarcastic standing ovation and slow clap on every viewing – thank you, Hollywood!
17: And you thought it was impossible: Aaron Eckhart makes facial disfiguration hilarious in The Dark Knight
Harvey, why so hilarious?
Approximately 75% of Harvey Dent’s appearances in The Dark Knight are kinda funny, and it’s not just down to the Richard Madeley style semi-mullet Eckhart is rocking for the role. Though, on reflection, that helps. There’s also the awesome facial expression he pulls when Rossi points a gun at him in court, then there’s the way he yells his dead girlfriend’s name every time a character mentions her, like ‘RACHEL!’ ‘RACHAAAALL!’ RACHUUUUUUL!’
But his efforts to extract himself from a warehouse filled with explosives while tied to a chair is the real wonder – violent yet ineffectual shifting around in his seat for a few seconds, dramatically tipping himself to the floor with a “blarrrrgh!”, turning his face directly into the gasoline that’s leaking all around him, then huffing and puffing it in and out of his mouth. An interesting attempt to escape the situation, and one that gets me howling 100% of the times I watch it.
16: Antichrist: Why, yes: women will just watch their child fall to their death if in the middle of an epic bang
“Get away from the window, Bobby – who am I kidding, I don’t care, LOL”
Like most people who’ve sat through Antichrist, I had no idea what to take away from the experience. But laughter probably wasn’t supposed to be it… If you haven’t seen the film, I’ll sum the storyline up for you. Disembowelled fox – nudity – real penetration, apparently – Charlotte Gainsbourg: sad her son died – Willem Dafoe: decides isolation in a wood cabin will help – Charlotte has a serial killer wall of paper cuttings – sex scenes – hammer to testicles – scissors to genitalia – something, something – etc. – it goes on.
I think the point the film was making was…women are evil. Women like sex too much? Willem Dafoe should do one more unerotic erotic film to go in a boxset with this and Body of Evidence. Not sure. Whatever the message, it’s grim, but there are laughs to be had in the drawn-out slow-mo sex scene where Dafoe and Gainsbourg don’t notice their son falling out of a window. Well, Gainsbourg’s character does notice something is amiss, glancing over Dafoe’s sweaty straining shoulder. Then she just, y’know, keeps going with what she’s doing.
15: Cannibalism is comedy in Snowpiercer
I wouldn’t eat that, Cap
As anyone who’s sat through Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Cannibal: the Musical will swear to, cannibalism is no laughing matter… but a tearful line reading of “I know what people taste like. Babies taste the best!” from Chris Evans in Snowpiercer really is.
14: Dun Dun DUUUUUUN - dramatic threesome in Shame
“Den of Geek… are laughing at my grundle?”
At the pinnacle of Brandon’s struggle with sex addiction in Shame, when the character is at his lowest point, there’s a threesome set to dramatic music that goes on for what feels like a long, long time…if you’re seeing it, say, in a packed cinema screening and everyone else is paying rapt, silent attention.
Of course, addiction, in whatever form, should be no laughing matter (according to everyone else in the audience at the screening where I saw the film, anyway), but the cognitive dissonance of seeing three attractive people having very energetic sex in a scene that’s supposed to be taken as tragic was too much for me. Yes, either the cognitive dissonance, or having the maturity level of a 12 year old.
13: The original and best – the ending of 1973’s The Wicker Man
“HOW DID IT GET BURNED, HOW DID IT”- uh, wrong film
“Think what you’re doing!!! OH GOD! [quick camera zoom on face] OH JESUS CHRIST! OH GOD!!! CHRIST!! NO, NO, DEAR GOD! CHRIIIIST!!”
12: Rachel gets fridged (cooked?) in The Dark Knight
Would a ‘KA-POW!’ joke be in poor t- yes.
Let’s head back to The Dark Knight for a slightly guiltier laugh. I don’t like the ‘Women in Refrigerators’ cliche that still abounds in my beloved comic books, comic book film adaptations, and Nicolas Cage movies – where wives and girlfriends get killed off in order to give a male protagonist (Spidey, Wolverine, Nicolas Cage) an excuse to bawww and beat-up bad guys.
But I laugh at this example, and I will fight you if you deny that the editing of Rachel’s death scene is completely unsympathetic, and therefore funny as f- fiery death can be. All Rachel gets out is a wistful “Someday-” before being blown to bits – just to give two boyfriends something to cry about. Harsh, Nolan, way harsh.
11: Wait – what? Last scene of Lawless
Probably should have read the book…
A lot of shi- stuff happens to bootlegging Bondurant brothers Howard, Forrest, Jack and their gal pal Maggie during the 115-minute running time of Lawless. So, the fairy tale ending where everyone settles down, gets married to someone of the opposite gender, and spawns in a nice log cabin in a picturesque setting is a little blah after the grit of the rest of the film.
But don’t worry, there’s still two minutes left until the credits roll! Just enough time for mumbling Forrest to wander out onto an icy lake alone, dance, crash through into the freezing water and die horribly in an ‘oh, oops, almost forgot, this also happened...’ rushed denouement. Audience: “Wait, what - he died?”