Comedy is subjective. A joke that has you laughing so hard your stomach hurts might be a complete miss for someone else. However, even in comedy, there are two types of people – People who like dead baby jokes, and people who do not.
Black comedy certainly isn’t for everyone.
However, for some, the juxtaposition of the worst things in life spun in the form of something ironic, sardonic, satirical, or sarcastic just hits. It doesn’t mean they’re disturbed either. Sometimes turning the worst things in life into a joke is a fine way of coping with reality.
If you enjoy a darker sort of humor, anime has never shied too far away from it. If black comedy is your comedy, then give these black comedy anime recommendations a try.
Best Black Comedy Anime
Life Lessons With Uramichi-Oniisan
As all adults eventually find out, adulthood is not the field of achieved dreams that we think it might be as a child. In fact, adulthood for many is rife with compromise and disappointment.
Life Lessons With Uramichi-Oniisan is all about that disappointment. The main character as well as his co-workers on a children’s TV show are all in the throes of just how bleak adulthood is, and sometimes that leaks out in front of the kids.
This is the perfect black comedy for those who find themselves ground up by their own adult experiences.
Zom 100 – Bucket List of The Dead
Zom 100 is quintessential black comedy anime. It follows a worker for an exploitative company so overjoyed to find out that a zombie apocalypse has started, and thus, he no longer needs to go to work! So he decides to spend his apocalypse, not so much surviving, but having as much fun as possible before he dies.
The series is still a zombie apocalypse anime. People are dying all around the main character. It even lets some deaths be sad for exactly one second before the main character gets right back to enjoying his apocalypse.
Zom 100 is actually pretty masterful at balancing the seriousness and the dark comedy of the series. It never gets too silly, but is never too serious for too long either. Furthermore, a lot of dark jokes are only comical for those that really enjoy their dark humor.
Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei
The titular Zetsubou-sensei, star of the show, maintains a distinctly negative and critical view of everything. So much so that it often culminates with him attempting to take his own life. Ironically, he is also a molder of young minds in the series.
However, while the show can have its serious mindfuckery moments, it is primarily a pretty amazing comedy that is made more impressive by how messed up much of the content in the show is.
Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan
This lesser known OVA features a young angel descending to earth with order to kill a young junior high boy who, in 20 years, will create a lolicon paradise by stopping all girls aging at 12 and making them immortal.
She instead decides to become a complete nuisance to this boy to prevent him from ever doing the work. While this all seems pretty light, many of the central jokes of the show involve Dokuro brutally murdering the boy and reviving him over and over again.
Welcome to the NHK
Welcome to the NHK is legendary among dark comedy anime.
The whole show has a very distinctive depressing vibe that accompanies the NEET lifestyle, and yet, it is also made a brilliant comedy by embracing the absurdity of the human mind and enhancing the absurdity of certain moments.
The series follows a NEET hikkikomori who lives like a shut-in parasite and spends his days getting lost in conspiracies and other idle fancies. While he meets a girl that is trying to help him rehabilitate, it doesn’t go well.
The dark humor in the series comes from often making jokes out of pretty serious situations, namely the time he accidentally joins a group suicide pact.
Paranoia Agent
Paranoia Agent isn’t always a dark comedy. It is actually one of those thought-provoking mindfuckery anime series that emphasizes the infectious nature of paranoia and delusion.
However, as the series is episodic and Satoshi Kon was well-known for injecting dark humor into some of his works, the series often makes light jokes out of heavy subjects like abuse and suicide.
Angel Beats
Like Paranoia Agent above, Angel Beats isn’t a dedicated dark comedy. However, it is a pretty good comedy when it’s not being a really good tearjerker.
The series follows a bunch of kids in the afterlife. They died, and are told to have a happy school life before they can move on. However, these kids band together to rebel against God since they all lived such miserable lives and died rather young.
Their back stories all hurt you terribly, but the series does enjoy the fact that they are immortal in the afterlife. This means it often uses their deaths as a punch line to the jokes – right up until it doesn’t, anyway.
Inferno Cop
Inferno Cop is a cop story where the cop is both the law and an outlaw in a town that has very loose rules.
Basically, it turns violence and a revenge story up to such an extreme that sometimes you wonder if they can even be serious. This is a series for those that like a frenetic pace accompanied by extreme, comical violence.
Excel Saga
Excel Saga is one of those comedy anime series that you either really love or don’t care for at all. The series follows the inept minion of an organization set on world domination. She constantly carries out orders to further that, and often messes up the schemes.
While that all sounds pretty basic, Excel Saga is most memorable for its speed. Everything is delivered quickly, which means jokes, references, and parody can come and go in the blink of an eye.
As the series follows an evil organization, their methods are not wholesome, and neither is their punishment for ineptitude.
Detroit Metal City
As a music anime, Detroit Metal City seems pretty innocent even if it is about metal music. However, it also satirizes the music industry and some of the darker lyrics in metal music, like 10 rapes per second moment.
The series follows a rather sweet college boy who has another persona that is a vicious metal rocker. So the comedy comes from seeing his two personalities exist in his life together.
You’re Being Summoned Azazel-san
Azazel-san is a detective show, but not just any detective show. In it, the detective summons low-level demons to help him solve mysteries.
His assistant, wanting to do that too, tries to summon a devil and gets Azazel. While not particularly malicious, he is a scumbag.
Instead of being a serious mystery-solving anime, this series is often a comical one. However, the mysteries run the gamut from silly to serious slaughter.
Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt
Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt is an experimental comedy anime that was meant to evoke and parody more Western-style animation. Apparently, they also think that Western sensibilities enjoy comedy that is more violent and sexual, though they may be right.
The series follows two angels that were kicked out of heaven for being very bad angels. Now, to get back, they run around the city defeating ghosts with a priest in order to get back in the good graces of the heavens. However, Stocking likes glutting herself on dessert and Panty enjoys seducing anything with a set of legs.
Dorohedoro
As Dorohedoro markets itself as a series about a main character with a cursed lizard head that hunts the mages that come to the city to cruelly experiment on random people, you would think it would be a darker, more serious series. While Dorohedoro certainly is dark, it actually is awash in black comedy as well.
What Dorohedoro really excels in is making everyone feel like very normal people even in a dark, brutal world of magic and suffering. Even its antagonists are not “evil for the sake of being evil,” but are just people doing their jobs, which makes the bits of workplace comedy unexpected and amazing.
Gintama
Gintama is a legendary comedy anime. It barely takes a breath before making its next joke. As a series of such densely packed humor, you can expect a few of the jokes to be of a more dark nature.
While Gintama often lives in the realm of absurd humor, some of its arcs have more dark comedy than others. They particularly enjoy making light of deaths, even ones that should be a bit impactful.
Hinamatsuri
There is a small nameless sub-genre of wholesome slice of life anime that I call “childcare anime” in which an adult takes care of a small child and learns life lessons from their innocence. Sometimes they are the parents, sometimes they are unrelated.
Hinamatsuri is a childcare anime where a Japanese gangster ends up the unwilling caretaker of a psychic who escaped her planet and crashed into his home.
While Hinamatsuri certainly has some of those “wholesome” moments between them, they are never not undercut by a joke that accents the worst sides of every character.
Humanity Has Declined
Most series on here are comedy anime meant to make you laugh. While Humanity Has Declined has a lot of good jokes, it is definitely more an anime that is trying to make you think about the symbolism it is showing you in those dark jokes.
The series details the long, slow, stupid extinction of the human race as they live out their remaining lives and attempt to co-exist with the silly fairies that will inherit the Earth.
As the series goes through its often silly non-linear adventures, you begin to see why humanity is going extinct. It really has some commentary on the wasteful way we live our lives even in the last days of our species.
Osomatsu-san
At a glance, this comedy about a set of sextuplet brothers and their various quirky personalities and antics isn’t that dark. However, the dark comedy becomes apparent pretty quickly when you discover that each brother, in their own way, is a failure as an adult.
Osomatsu-san turns the “failure to launch” of these unemployed adult brothers who live with their parents into a comedy, and its isn’t afraid to punch hard at their failures either.
Prison School
Prison School is easily the most horny black comedy on this list, but I think it is the lewdness that it injects that really makes it a comedy. Otherwise it would just be women beating up men.
The series follows five boys accepted into a recently co-ed school of girls. However, after getting caught peeping on some girls, they are sent to the school’s underground prison.
It is there that they are brutally, and sometimes sexily, punished.
Watamote
Unlike other black comedy anime that use violence for laughs, Watamote tends to use something a bit more relatable – the sad social ineptitude of otaku.
Watamote follows an otaku girl who wants to be popular in her new high school life, but is a big otaku who has really only interacted with people in her dating sims. However, she deploys a variety of schemes that will hopefully produce some friends.
They don’t.
Watamote is more a cringe comedy for many anime fans, but its jokes are as funny as they are sad.
Chainsaw Man
Chainsaw Man is part of the darker wave of shounen anime where the protagonist isn’t idealistic and noble, and every character around him is kind of a awful person too. However, when every character is a terrible person, you can really embrace some deep levels of dark comedy.
Not only does Chainsaw Man express itself in a pretty graphic level of gore, but it loves making a joke out of the worst side of its characters. They all have very clear flaws, and it is a joy to watch them often be bad friends and co-workers to each other.
Hozuki’s Coolheadedness
Taking a spin on workplace anime, Hozuki’s Coolheadedness turns human suffering into a lovely comedy by following the bureaucracy of hell.
This series follows Hozuki, an assistant to the King of Hell that makes sure everything is kept on track. However, while there are a few anime set in hell that are surprisingly wholesome, this is not one of them. Between the torture of human souls and the punishment of lazier colleagues, Hozuki loves using brutal violence for laughs.
Dropkick on My Devil
Like a few other anime on this list, Dropkick on by Devil gets its comedy from the juxtaposition of cute girls being graphically violent to a durable fantasy creature.
This series follows a demon that was summoned by an occult dabbler who isn’t sure how to send her back. However, the demon knows that if she kills the girl who summoned her, she can go back home. Unfortunately she isn’t quite adept at killing off a school girl, and the school girl often retaliates with extreme and diverse violence.
Do you know more anime that really highlight black comedy with some dark jokes? Let fans know in the comments section below.
