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8 Signs You’re Watching a Post-Comedy Comedy

There’s an impulse toward bleakness driving the recent cohort of comedies. People tend to die in them, or fear for their lives, or generally be suffused with sadness. They’re works that often cross genres or combine tropes from disparate, seemingly ill-fitting forms. It’s a cohort that includes both movies like Get Out, something that begins as an awkward comedy and turns into a horror about race, and TV shows like Search Party, which stitches a classic disappeared-girl trope together with a satire of millennial ennui. It’s post-comedy.
Even though many post-comedies hum along on a feeling of ambiguity — am I allowed to be laughing? Am I supposed to be legitimately worried for these people right now?! — there are now enough of them that you can start to see patterns in how they work, how they’re put together, and what they look like. Here are some of the telltale signs you’re watching something made in a post-comedy era.

A confused, ambiguous protagonist

One of the biggest distinguishing characteristics between your garden-variety sitcom and this darker area of comedy storytelling is the protagonist, who resists both the generally unchanging status quo of a sitcom lead and the full-on, unrelenting antihero qualities of a prestige drama. The main character in a dark comedy tends to lean. They’re wafflers. They’re trying to do good things, or want to think of themselves as good, or have areas of their lives where they’re just regular people trying to do normal, familiar stuff. And then, by accident or circumstance or persuasion, they get pulled into a different kind of story and tend to find themselves digging graves, or laundering money, or frantically cleaning blood off of a neighbor’s dog.
Think of Search Party’s Dory, sitting down for a Brooklyn brunch with her delightful, shallow friends, incapable of shaking her new obsession with hunting for her missing friend. Or Barry Berkman from HBO’s Barry, who would like to get out of the crime business and make new friends at acting class, but who can’t seem to stop killing people. It can also take the form of a comedy about knowing and defining oneself, as in Atlanta or Baskets or Transparent. These comedies rely on a tone and plot that shifts between serious and funny, and the protagonist has to straddle both sides.

The funny bit-players

Once you’ve got the sometimes-funny, sometimes-bleak protagonist in place, you need a supporting cast to help flesh out all the different tones. Often, that breaks down to some friends (or siblings or co-workers) who are initially designed to be the funny, happy ones — but as a fiction evolves, they often get shaded with more nuanced, emotional stories. On BoJack Horseman, this is Mr Peanutbutter, or any of the many side characters who exist mostly to provide hilarious bits of silliness (e.g., Tom Jumbo-Grumbo). For a show like Search Party, it’s Portia and Elliott, who can barely focus on Dory’s serious investigation long enough to stay for the creepy parts of a mysterious cult party.

The grim plot-movers

The balance of a dark comedy means that while the protagonist is trapped in the middle, often tilting from silliness to bleak humanity and then back again, one group of side characters are often the comic relief, and the other group are the baddies. This also tends to break down along criminal versus “normal” lines — on a show like Weeds, Nancy Botwin’s cohort of suburban parents begin as the comedy and her drug suppliers are the villains. Barry is divided into the acting classmates and Barry’s Chechen mobster associates. But it can happen outside of stories that specifically involve crime, too. On BoJack, story tends to come from Princess Carolyn, while Mr. Peanutbutter retains the friend role. On Transparent, Maura’s trans friends are (sadly) often sidelined as supportive cheerleaders, while her children provide most of the plot impetus.
In the best dark comedies, these roles quickly bleed into one another, so that the characters who begin mostly to reinforce the status quo also provide pathos, and the criminal elements are also the funniest bits of a series. Barry’s NoHo Hank is often the silliest voice on that series; on a show like Succession, Matthew Macfadyen’s Tom Wamsgans begins mostly as a pitiably absurd bootlicker and gradually shifts into a legitimate, gut-twistingly tragic figure.

Real human bodies, often in pain

In physical comedy, or in many more mannered sitcoms, there’s an undercurrent of humor that stems from feeling divorced from the bodily reality of the characters. Pratfalls and pies-in-faces are funny because they refer to the idea of someone being hurt or physically humiliated, but part of why we can laugh is that we know it’s an act. The funniness of America’s Funniest Home Videos relies on the clip nature of the show, where stupid, senseless pain happens (often to a guy’s groin), and then the video ends before we ever have to reckon with the aftermath.
One of the hallmarks of the serious comedy is a refusal to skirt around bodily realities. In the third season of Playing House, one of the two protagonists gets cancer; the opening premise of One Mississippi is grappling with the way bodies break down; a show like Transparent is necessarily and relentlessly about the relationship between body and identity. This is a notable feature in the stand-up side of this trend, too — Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, Carmen Esposito’s Rape Jokes, and even Ali Wong’s comparatively lighthearted Hard Knock Wife all take the body as a serious grounding point, both as a physical object and for all of its associated cultural valances.

Self-referentiality

There’s nothing a serious comedy loves more than knowing winks at the audience and jokes about itself and its own structure. A movie like Game Night is almost too silly to fit into a category that also includes Baskets or Atlanta, but it loves playing with winking meta-commentary with lines like, “Let’s pick a tone. Let’s stick with it.” Much of Barry is about the process of acting, how to do it well, and what terrible acting looks like. In stand-up, shows like Drew Michael’s special and, yes, Nanette are all about deconstructing the act of doing a stand-up comedy routine. Vulture’s Jesse David Fox refers to this entire movement as “post-comedy,” a name that relies on painful self-awareness as an unavoidable feature of the genre.

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