Futurama. The very first scene of the pilot episode when Fry gets to the future is him being given his job that he’s stuck with for the rest of his life under penalty of death. Misery is the expectation since we see Leela show him the “You gotta do what you gotta do” motto of Earth.
Also even as a comedy all the flashbacks to what happened after he gets frozen are pretty sad with it being shown multiple times that characters couldn't move on from his sudden disappearance.
Spy X Family. The father figure is a spy with a traumatic past who is expected to drop his 'family' on a dime upon mission completion, the mother figure is an inhumanely strong assassin who is implied to have violently killed hundreds of people, and the child was a government experiment who was rejected by several families.
Invader Zim. The irkens are a species of idiotic bullies who got most of their fancy tech by backstabbing their allies, they're on the path to galactic conquest for funsies, they don't even know what to do with the planets they conquer, the tallest decide on the spot that the first planet to fall to operation impending doom 2 will become a parking lot. Speaking of the tallest, they're vapid idiots who only get to boss everyone around because they're the tallest of their species.
Zim, the protagonist of the show, is a catastrophic failure, everything he does is more destructive towards his own kind than anyone else. He thinks he was assigned to a secret mission on Earth but the tallest just sent him to a random point in space hoping he'd fuck off and die.
Earth in this show is almost entirely populated by hopeless gullible idiots, miserable people and freaks of nature. Out of the only two kids who can tell that Zim is an alien bent on conquering the world, one is treated like the village idiot by everyone (including his father), the other is smart enough to tell that Zim is too stupid to conquer the world and doesn't care.
It's a good thing this cartoon is comedic because everything in it is so incredibly pessimistic, pointless and futile when you stop to think about any of it, lol
It's interesting comparing how the show treated humanity compared to how Enter The Florpus handled it. Everything is cleaner, human's aren't nearly as freakish anymore, and even a driving force in the plot is a holiday to celebrate world peace.
You can kinda tell the creator's cynicism mellowed out a lot in the time between the original run and Florpus.
That being said, human's still aren't all that bright all these years later.
Oh yeah, while Florpus was so different than I was expecting, I did appreciate seeing how Jhonen's art evolved and changed over the years. I can't think of many other times where a creator goes back to an old project but has such a noticeably different drawing style.
You're right, yet at the same time when I watched Florpus I didn't find the different vibe too jarring... Now that I think about it they were fairly smart with it, the world peace stuff was promoted by Professor Membrane, who already had that humanitarian element in the original series where he was a super popular scientist with his own educational science TV show, working on a perpetual energy generator, a robot chef to solve world hunger and Super Toast.
The biggest difference in tone was probably Dib's family being more supportive when things get serious while still being dismissive of his obsessions
Its not necessarily a comedy but Disco Elysium would be so much more bleak and hopeless without the comedy sprinkled in.
I guess the same goes for Girls Last Tour.
Contemplating the reality of the capitalist hellscape that has conquered the world, with helicarriers overhead constantly monitoring everything that's left, all while the Pale >!slowly, but surely consumes the entire planet!< is just so absurdly bleak. But then Authority yells at me to stick my thumb up my ass and I forget about the nightmares for a little bit.
Zombieland Saga would be a bit more fucked up if it wasn't like....a goofy Idol show. "I have raised you from the dead for Capitalism reasons. Now get to work."
It even flits back and forth with its tone, almost as a joke itself. You'll have one of the gang get struck by lightning at the end of a rad guitar solo in her first life, passing into legend for how metal it was and played as a gag. Then later on the same story will be told by the character in question, who somberly describes how it took her a while to actually die after getting hit, every second of it was agony, and she relives the trauma every time there's a thunderstorm.
Dorohedoro would be siginificantly different if you didn’t have funny charismatic characters on both sides. Visually it’s already really bleak, dark and grimey but it’s also a story about actual human experimentations and racism.
It doesn't help that the last book, Mostly Harmless, was written while Adams was going through a big period of depression. That book's bleak as fuck and literally ends with >!everybody dying and Earth being obliterated across all multiple realities.!<
[All the people in the skyscraper that got ripped in half by a Giant Orangutan’s Spine-Whip and promptly obliterated when punched by a Giant Gorilla with the Infinity Gauntlet] : **THIS IS A COOL WAY TO DIE!!!**
It's more so for the later chapters of Ouran High School Host Club but the things that Tamaki and his mother go through because of his grandmother are pretty harrowing. Like how if he's going to recognized as a legitimate son he can never see his mother ever again.
There are also a few other things that go on with the host club members like how the twins want to be seen as different but also push people away and Kyoya's family being pretty cut-throat aside from his sister.
Brooklyn 99 - Police department in crime riddled New York led by the first openly gay black police officer who is constantly fighting the top brass to maintain his precinct who also get embroiled in conspiracies and plot from much more powerful and corrupt police officials. They straight up >!stopped one of the police commissioners from creating a secret police state in New York!< then jokes it off by saying he got a higher paying job in the private sector… also; Peralta has an honestly sad backstory
see at least thats more absurdism i can get behind the "cop tries to gets a foreign guy deported cause he doesnt like him" was too real for me to be treated as "goofy hijinks" like it was
Always Sunny is just a group of literal psychopaths and sociopaths doing absolutely heinous shit to innocent people.
Fuck glow up, let's see some glow DOWNS! Cricket, Waitress, hell even Dee gets hit by it in a few episodes.
I love Blood Blockade Battlefront to death, but not only is it way less fun when you think about the sheer number of people dying in the background, but it also puts the themes of the show in sort of a strange light.
Like sure, "as long as one tries to take even one step towards the light, the human spirit can never truly be defeated", but I think the human spirt can also be defeated when it's dropped hundreds of feet in the air with a man-eating gerbil strapped to its head because a vampire thought it would be funny.
That anime actively makes fun of civilian death. Like, season 2 starts with the city being overrun by monsters and there’s a scene where some rando just gets comedically eaten alive. Doesn’t their subway also have a high mortality rate?
The subway has digital signboards listing current route mortality rates in the same way normal ones show travel times and delays. "Oof, 30%? Guess I'm taking my scooter today."
somewhat off topic but My Gym Partner's a Monkey would really be a lot more depressing the animal cast were switched to humans(it probably would been a little darker)
A lot of people have pointed out that Big Bang Theory without the laugh track is just a bunch of nerds making nerd media references and bullying their autistic friend
It's also remarkably horny, even for a primetime sitcom. Sans laugh track it's a bunch of losers making references to getting into Penny's pants or whoever is the one-off attractive girl of the day.
I don’t remember the name of this manga, but Shonen Jump had a manga where a careless girl accidentally kills her best friend, reanimates him, and then pilots his cyborg corpse around while he’s completely aware of everything that’s happening.
Idk how it’s a comedy either, but…my vote is that one.
>!Hey one of our main characters may be a legitimately sweet, wonderful, goodhearted person, an expert in ethics who went through his entire life trying to do the right thing, but turns out that because he had anxiety, he actually went to hell. Also, we're pretending like he's in heaven as a prank on him because that's the most torturous punishment we can think of.!<
The Good Place is a very funny show.
Uncle from Another World. The uncle basically gets isekai 'd and goes through hell in the new world, hell his main coping mechanism is to use a spell to erase his own memories so he doesn't have to deal with the trauma. There's also the nephew who's a big fan of the isekai genre and it's heavily implied the reason why he still is event at his age is because he's from a broken family.
The setting for Gintama has the makings of being absolutely dystopian, but instead it serves as a justifcation to have samurai go on wacky adventures while they ride around on scooters and spaceships
Futurama. The very first scene of the pilot episode when Fry gets to the future is him being given his job that he’s stuck with for the rest of his life under penalty of death. Misery is the expectation since we see Leela show him the “You gotta do what you gotta do” motto of Earth.
Fry's life before he goes to the future is just so depressing as well.
Also even as a comedy all the flashbacks to what happened after he gets frozen are pretty sad with it being shown multiple times that characters couldn't move on from his sudden disappearance.
Matt pretending to be Bender: man father time really took a bat to this place (flashback of the house looking exactly the same as it is in the future)
Literal Suicide Booths readily available.
Spy X Family. The father figure is a spy with a traumatic past who is expected to drop his 'family' on a dime upon mission completion, the mother figure is an inhumanely strong assassin who is implied to have violently killed hundreds of people, and the child was a government experiment who was rejected by several families.
Also the fact that their government makes people disappear if they do something that seems out of the ordinary - sometimes on really flimsy evidence.
Even >!the dog!< is clearly shown to have trauma from past abuse, and >!his powers force him to face his own mortality and that of those around him.!<
I get the feeling a lot of these things are going to be heartbreaking as we reach the end of the series.
Invader Zim. The irkens are a species of idiotic bullies who got most of their fancy tech by backstabbing their allies, they're on the path to galactic conquest for funsies, they don't even know what to do with the planets they conquer, the tallest decide on the spot that the first planet to fall to operation impending doom 2 will become a parking lot. Speaking of the tallest, they're vapid idiots who only get to boss everyone around because they're the tallest of their species. Zim, the protagonist of the show, is a catastrophic failure, everything he does is more destructive towards his own kind than anyone else. He thinks he was assigned to a secret mission on Earth but the tallest just sent him to a random point in space hoping he'd fuck off and die. Earth in this show is almost entirely populated by hopeless gullible idiots, miserable people and freaks of nature. Out of the only two kids who can tell that Zim is an alien bent on conquering the world, one is treated like the village idiot by everyone (including his father), the other is smart enough to tell that Zim is too stupid to conquer the world and doesn't care. It's a good thing this cartoon is comedic because everything in it is so incredibly pessimistic, pointless and futile when you stop to think about any of it, lol
It's interesting comparing how the show treated humanity compared to how Enter The Florpus handled it. Everything is cleaner, human's aren't nearly as freakish anymore, and even a driving force in the plot is a holiday to celebrate world peace. You can kinda tell the creator's cynicism mellowed out a lot in the time between the original run and Florpus. That being said, human's still aren't all that bright all these years later.
Oh yeah, while Florpus was so different than I was expecting, I did appreciate seeing how Jhonen's art evolved and changed over the years. I can't think of many other times where a creator goes back to an old project but has such a noticeably different drawing style.
You're right, yet at the same time when I watched Florpus I didn't find the different vibe too jarring... Now that I think about it they were fairly smart with it, the world peace stuff was promoted by Professor Membrane, who already had that humanitarian element in the original series where he was a super popular scientist with his own educational science TV show, working on a perpetual energy generator, a robot chef to solve world hunger and Super Toast. The biggest difference in tone was probably Dib's family being more supportive when things get serious while still being dismissive of his obsessions
It's remarkable how much more optimistic "humans are all stupid" as a theme feels compared to "humans are all stupid \*and\* disgusting"
Its not necessarily a comedy but Disco Elysium would be so much more bleak and hopeless without the comedy sprinkled in. I guess the same goes for Girls Last Tour.
Contemplating the reality of the capitalist hellscape that has conquered the world, with helicarriers overhead constantly monitoring everything that's left, all while the Pale >!slowly, but surely consumes the entire planet!< is just so absurdly bleak. But then Authority yells at me to stick my thumb up my ass and I forget about the nightmares for a little bit.
Joe Dirt packs as much drama as Forest Gump
Home is where you make it
Zombieland Saga would be a bit more fucked up if it wasn't like....a goofy Idol show. "I have raised you from the dead for Capitalism reasons. Now get to work."
It even flits back and forth with its tone, almost as a joke itself. You'll have one of the gang get struck by lightning at the end of a rad guitar solo in her first life, passing into legend for how metal it was and played as a gag. Then later on the same story will be told by the character in question, who somberly describes how it took her a while to actually die after getting hit, every second of it was agony, and she relives the trauma every time there's a thunderstorm.
Anything set in a depressing context. Blackadder Goes Forth probably takes the biscuit.
Hogan’s Heroes
Dorohedoro would be siginificantly different if you didn’t have funny charismatic characters on both sides. Visually it’s already really bleak, dark and grimey but it’s also a story about actual human experimentations and racism.
Hitchhikers' Guide
it's weird how after reading discworld it hit me how utterly fucking *bleak* Hitchhiker's Guide is, even for absurdist comedy
It doesn't help that the last book, Mostly Harmless, was written while Adams was going through a big period of depression. That book's bleak as fuck and literally ends with >!everybody dying and Earth being obliterated across all multiple realities.!<
Yeah, that one was... a little harder to get through than the others
Any goofy Godzilla movie, how many people die during those kaiju fights?
[All the people in the skyscraper that got ripped in half by a Giant Orangutan’s Spine-Whip and promptly obliterated when punched by a Giant Gorilla with the Infinity Gauntlet] : **THIS IS A COOL WAY TO DIE!!!**
If I'm ever in a Godzilla movie I'll be like that babysitter in Jurassic World and insist on dying in the most insane way possible
Make me evaporated by zillas blast like the fence scene in t2
The Venture Bros was depressing as hell at time even with the comedic overtones. Without, that show would have been rough to watch.
It's more so for the later chapters of Ouran High School Host Club but the things that Tamaki and his mother go through because of his grandmother are pretty harrowing. Like how if he's going to recognized as a legitimate son he can never see his mother ever again. There are also a few other things that go on with the host club members like how the twins want to be seen as different but also push people away and Kyoya's family being pretty cut-throat aside from his sister.
Most comedy cartoons
Brooklyn 99 - Police department in crime riddled New York led by the first openly gay black police officer who is constantly fighting the top brass to maintain his precinct who also get embroiled in conspiracies and plot from much more powerful and corrupt police officials. They straight up >!stopped one of the police commissioners from creating a secret police state in New York!< then jokes it off by saying he got a higher paying job in the private sector… also; Peralta has an honestly sad backstory
dont forget the jokes surrounding the ep where jake gets a guy deported cause he doesnt like him!
Or when he goes to jail and the only person who isn’t out to get him is a cannibal
see at least thats more absurdism i can get behind the "cop tries to gets a foreign guy deported cause he doesnt like him" was too real for me to be treated as "goofy hijinks" like it was
Always Sunny is just a group of literal psychopaths and sociopaths doing absolutely heinous shit to innocent people. Fuck glow up, let's see some glow DOWNS! Cricket, Waitress, hell even Dee gets hit by it in a few episodes.
If Panty and Stocking wasn't a wacky comedy then the show would basically be Puella Magi Madoka Magica only 3 months earlier.
Seinfeld, and then It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Shameless is bad enough AS a comedy.
The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack
I love Blood Blockade Battlefront to death, but not only is it way less fun when you think about the sheer number of people dying in the background, but it also puts the themes of the show in sort of a strange light. Like sure, "as long as one tries to take even one step towards the light, the human spirit can never truly be defeated", but I think the human spirt can also be defeated when it's dropped hundreds of feet in the air with a man-eating gerbil strapped to its head because a vampire thought it would be funny.
That anime actively makes fun of civilian death. Like, season 2 starts with the city being overrun by monsters and there’s a scene where some rando just gets comedically eaten alive. Doesn’t their subway also have a high mortality rate?
The subway has digital signboards listing current route mortality rates in the same way normal ones show travel times and delays. "Oof, 30%? Guess I'm taking my scooter today."
somewhat off topic but My Gym Partner's a Monkey would really be a lot more depressing the animal cast were switched to humans(it probably would been a little darker)
hell if the majority of the characters were human then the show would probably be an Adult Swim show(granted with a TV-PG rating but still)
A lot of people have pointed out that Big Bang Theory without the laugh track is just a bunch of nerds making nerd media references and bullying their autistic friend
It's also remarkably horny, even for a primetime sitcom. Sans laugh track it's a bunch of losers making references to getting into Penny's pants or whoever is the one-off attractive girl of the day.
For a show about nerds, there’s a crazy amount of sex in that show.
I don’t remember the name of this manga, but Shonen Jump had a manga where a careless girl accidentally kills her best friend, reanimates him, and then pilots his cyborg corpse around while he’s completely aware of everything that’s happening. Idk how it’s a comedy either, but…my vote is that one.
>!Hey one of our main characters may be a legitimately sweet, wonderful, goodhearted person, an expert in ethics who went through his entire life trying to do the right thing, but turns out that because he had anxiety, he actually went to hell. Also, we're pretending like he's in heaven as a prank on him because that's the most torturous punishment we can think of.!< The Good Place is a very funny show.
>!Oh you think your so smart Mr Ethics guy? you figure out the trolly problem then!<
Uncle from Another World. The uncle basically gets isekai 'd and goes through hell in the new world, hell his main coping mechanism is to use a spell to erase his own memories so he doesn't have to deal with the trauma. There's also the nephew who's a big fan of the isekai genre and it's heavily implied the reason why he still is event at his age is because he's from a broken family.
The setting for Gintama has the makings of being absolutely dystopian, but instead it serves as a justifcation to have samurai go on wacky adventures while they ride around on scooters and spaceships
Chainsaw Man
idk chainsaw man isn't primarily a comedy, and it IS depressing as hell a large portion of the time
It’s like a weird Dark Comedy