Dark Humor And Satire In Pulp Fiction

‘I am watching this, I’m not laughing out loud, the characters are not making any jokes, the situation the characters are in is not comical, yet I still find this humorous.’ This is a presumably accurate thought any human may have while watching a work containing dark humor. It is not portrayed as outwardly funny or comical, yet there is a something quite subtle in the situation that makes people laugh, or even work up a slight shameful grin. They shouldn’t be laughing at the work, but yet it’s still amusing and humorous. Dark humor, essentially, is a comic work that has elements of both tragedy and comedy that usually contains gloomy or morbid satire (Dark Comedy | Define dark comedy at dictionary.com ). It is usually used to make a taboo or morbid subject matter lighter and easier to talk about. As a society, we have many faults and shortcomings that exemplify us as flawed human beings. That is why dark humor is an integral part of American humor. Through the use of both comedy and tragedy being portrayed through morbid satire, dark humor allows us as a nation to observe our flaws and understand the mistakes we make, in order to not make the same ones again, or change the way society deals with them.

The diner scene shows how and why criminals commit the crimes they do, and it is comical to see them give reasoning as to why they commit the crime just seconds before they decide to commit it. “The Bonnie situation” is another excellent example because it shows the disregard the mobsters and the other people involved have for the gruesome crime that was just committed, and they did not act in the way we would have supposed. Dark humor’s purpose is to display both tragedy and humor through morbid satire, something that Pulp Fiction