10 Incredibly Dark Comedies That Dare You To Laugh

8. Fight Club (1999)

As Fight Club punched its way through cinema screens and into the public consciousness, it was easy to dismiss the film as a series of shock tactics desperate to get a reaction like a boy prodding a beehive with a stick. After all, everything about it seemed purpose-built to provoke: a man who fakes his way into support groups, another man who creates soap from the leftover fat found outside liposuction clinics, a terrorist organisation blowing smiley faces into the sides of buildings, and of course, the idea that a bunch of blokes beating the hell out of each other for the best of two hours constitutes a story. But Fight Club was much more than that. Through our nameless narrator (Ed Norton) and the twisted philosophy of ubermensch Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), the film took the masculinity crisis, a growing sense of millennial angst and some good old fashioned social satire and turned them into a modern masterpiece. What's more, it was pretty funny in the process. After all, who said self-destruction had to be serious? Darkest Comedy Moment: Although the 'Raymond K. Hessel' scene takes some dark detours before its oddly enlightening twist, the film's funniest (and filthiest) lines come from the smoky mouth of Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter). Slumping to her pillow after having sex with Tyler, she tells him ''I haven't been f**ked like that since grade school''- a line that even he shudders at. On the DVD commentary Bonham Carter admits that the impact of that line had only recently hit home; she thought that 'grade school' was what Americans called high school. Erm...still, it could have been worse: her line was originally ''I want to have your abortion''.