Abstract
Various analyses have identified the prominent use of ironically light music in dark comedy films, which provide humorous representations of serious and potentially taboo subjects. Equally, composers and directors often claim a desire to not musically reflect the humour when creating such films. This chapter will analyse the music of Fargo (1996, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen), In Bruges (2008, dir. Martin McDonagh), Four Lions (2010, dir. Chris Morris), and The Death of Stalin (2017, dir. Armando Iannucci) to explore the range of audiovisual relationships and multiple functions of music in contemporary dark comedies. Incongruence (a prevalent concept in film music studies and comedy theory) will be advocated as a helpful lens for considering how music might achieve these functions; influence audience perception and interpretation; and contribute to the films’ wider representational strategies and comedic modality, a particularly pertinent issue given their often weighty subject matter.
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Notes
- 1.
For more on the music in Monty Python films, see Emile Wennekes’s chapter in this volume.
- 2.
Existing research (e.g. Rowe and Regehr 2010) has investigated the use of dark humour, also sometimes called gallows or sick humour, as a coping strategy, particularly by those working in stressful contexts like frontline emergency services. There has also been considerable study of the broader influence of humour on social and emotional well-being and physical and mental health (see Martin and Ford 2018, pp. 283–342 for an overview).
- 3.
For example, Gehring (1996) argues that classic film noir Chinatown (1974, dir. Roman Polanski, music by Jerry Goldsmith) could be considered a dark comedy due to frequent humorous moments.
- 4.
Empirical evidence implicates different cognitive and neurological processes in incongruence perception and resolution. See Martin and Ford (2018, pp. 55–67) for an overview.
- 5.
The year 1996 represents twenty-five years from the time of writing. Whilst the British Comedy Guide list represents the subjective perspective of its authors, it is less unwieldy than most online rankings of black/dark comedies. All the films listed feature on other lists of influential black/dark comedies (e.g. Rotten Tomatoes n.d.; Sharp n.d.) and are listed as black/dark comedies on the Internet Movie Database confirming their suitability as examples.
- 6.
These sequences echo Ealing dark comedy The Ladykillers, which Morris cites as an influence (Brooks 2010).
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Ireland, D. (2023). ‘The Music Shouldn’t Acknowledge Any of the Jokes’. Audiovisual Incongruence and the Functions of Music in Contemporary Dark Comedy Films. In: Audissino, E., Wennekes, E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Music in Comedy Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33422-1_11
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