What is Dark Humor?

We didn’t set out to be dark humorists. It wasn’t as though we woke up one morning and thought, “You know what the world needs more of? Jokes about mortality, despair, and the cosmic futility of existence, but make it punchy.” Yet here we are, two cartoonists inadvertently labeled as “dark,” though to us, we’re simply drawing the world as we see it.

You’ve probably encountered dark humor before, even if you didn’t have the vocabulary for it at the time. It’s the joke at the funeral that makes everyone laugh and then feel bad about laughing. It’s the absurdity of a banana peel on the sidewalk – funny in theory, but not when you see someone actually slip on it and need stitches. In its essence, dark humor is the cognitive dissonance between the horrible and the hilarious. A gag reflex for the soul.

We’ve been told that our work fits the description. To us, though, it’s just humor. We doodle absurd conversations between zombies because, well, who better to joke about the inevitability of death than someone who’s already dead? Is that dark? Or is it honest? Perhaps it’s a distinction without a difference.

Amusement in the Abyss

The thing about dark humor is that it’s not for everyone. There’s a specific type of person who sees a cartoon of the Grim Reaper at a speed dating event and laughs, not because they’re heartless, but because they recognize something true. The audience for this kind of humor understands that the world is simultaneously ridiculous and terrifying, a spinning carnival ride that occasionally throws someone off. The laugh isn’t always a laugh of joy. Sometimes it’s a laugh of recognition, of defiance, or of sheer exasperation.

You don’t craft a joke about existential dread without risking the ire of someone who finds no amusement in the abyss. We’ve had our fair share of angry emails, some thoughtful and others… less so. “Why do you make light of tragedy?” they ask. It’s a fair question, though it assumes that humor trivializes rather than processes. When the world feels too heavy, humor is sometimes the only tool left to lift it.

Life is Messy

If we were being self-important, we might argue that dark humor is catharsis. It’s not about making suffering funny but about finding something to latch onto in the face of it. It’s laughing because crying alone feels incomplete. It’s a tiny rebellion against entropy.

Still, we never planned for our work to be labeled. We just draw what comes to mind: absurd scenarios, anthropomorphic coffee cups arguing over which one gets drunk first, a worm in a therapist’s chair confessing its fetish of becoming a bird’s lunch. If those drawings make people laugh – even nervously, even uneasily – then maybe we’ve done something worthwhile.

In the end, dark humor might just be an acknowledgment. Life is messy and unpredictable, full of moments that feel like punchlines to jokes we didn’t realize we were telling. If our comics help people see that – if they can laugh, even for a moment, at the absurdity of it all – then perhaps the label isn’t so bad after all. We’ll take “dark” if it means shining a little light on the human condition.

– Jonathan & Elizabeth