Nighty Night took the viciously cruel landscape of the noughties comedy scene, which also saw the rise of Steve Coogan, Ricky Gervais and Chris Morris to name a few and made it her own. The humour was so close to the bone and was often much more sickom than sitcom. As a result, Nighty Night epitomised the noughties dark comedy scene.
This wasn’t the only show that did so though, Father Ted, The Thick of It and Human Remains (also by Davis) were all shows that were fiercely twisted but equally wickedly funny. Father Ted followed randy, alcoholic, badly behaved priests and The Thick of It showed the dark realities of life in politics. They brought wonderful female characters to the centre of their shows, proving women could be just as funny, if not more funny, than their male counterparts.
Before the likes of Gavin & Stacey, Shaun Pye’s Monkey Dust was BBC Three’s saving grace when it came to comedy in the early 2000’s. It consisted of multiple darkly, satirical vignettes that portray a dystopian, disgusting and depraved Broken Britain. It was a show that made you want to laugh and cry at the same time- the beauty if you like dark comedies which are often embedded in pathos.
The Day Today and Brass Eye in the 1990s satirically covered topics such as Drugs, Bestiality, the AIDS pandemic and moral panics surrounding Pedophilia. The show covered dark humour but managed to also help many Britons become fearless about discussing certain taboo topics. Chris Morris, like Davis, said the unsayable and not many comics have come close to it since.
However, in recent years, dark comedy in its truest form seems to have disappeared. Now not completely, don’t get me wrong, shows such as Phoebe Waller Bridge’s Fleabag, Damon Beesley’s The Inbetweeners and Paul Abbott’s, Shameless, all cut close to the cloth but none of them cut right through to the bone. Most of them make you cringe more than anything else.
Of course, we live in a different type of Britain these days. Some of the material from the shows stated above are incredibly dated but the genre of dark comedy does seem to have disappeared slightly into the abyss. There is a difference between censorship over show’s with outdated attitudes and show’s that cover taboo subjects. This is something we mustn’t forget.
Dark comedy is a vehicle to tackle difficult subject matters in a light that makes them accessible for others to understand and process. Comedy is a tonic that helps dilute trauma and helps people digest taboos, making dark or black comedy a necessity.
So, whether or not we have said Nighty Night to Dark comedy, it doesn’t really matter because most of it is on BBC IPlayer anyway!