“Dying is easy, comedy is hard”, or so the saying goes. And, it's true! Have you ever tried to sit down and actually write something funny? I mean really sit down and try and make a gutbuster. It's easy enough to make something akin to a meme, a single one off line that can get regurgitated until it's nothing but the comedic equivalent of baby bird feedings. It's also easy enough to write a single joke. The old reliable formula of setup → punchline has been around for decades if not centuries. No, when people say “comedy is hard” they mean that making good, long lasting comedy is hard. Getting a person to laugh once is peanuts compared to getting that same person to laugh repeatedly at the same joke. What defines a good joke from a great one? It's not exactly something you can measure, especially with the range and scale of comedy being as broad as your mom's waistline. There's good old fashioned slapstick, ala Three Stooges, surrealist non sequitur humor ala Monty Python or Family Guy, or the classic literary wit of Terry Pratchett. And finally there's the subject of today's rambling: the black comedy. Extracting humor from the world's more dower and depraved orifices, the black comedy requires an even gentler hand to handle its subject matter appropriately. Making jokes about things like death, racism, self harm, or any other bleak subject matter is all well and good but actually telling a joke in that space that's repeatedly funny instead of insensitive is like walking on eggshells while wearing cleats. But when it's done right the black comedy is home to some of my favorite storytelling techniques. It's a great way to add levity to a dower situation without resorting to more broad comedic strokes that risk upsetting the tone you're trying to establish. Or to put it another way, nothing ruins a funeral like a fart joke.

It's this delicate balance that today's subject walks like a tightrope between two buildings on fire, Fargo, the seminal 1996 black comedy from those wacky Coen Brothers. Meticulously designed from back to front, Fargo is the story of Jerry Lundegaard, family man and car salesman who has run into a bit of money trouble and does the sensible thing we would all do in that situation: hire two petty criminals to kidnap his wife and extort his father in law for ransom money. What follows can only be described as the funniest movie ever made that isn't funny at all. Despite the mountains of praise I'm about to heap upon Fargo's comedic chops, I think it should be explained that there isn't a single joke in Fargo. Not in the traditional sense, anyway. No, Fargo is not the place you go if you're in the mood for a pie in the face gag, this is a place devoted to the art of black comedy, cringe comedy, dramatic irony, enjoyment of the macabre, etc. Fargo is a black comedy, yes, but more specifically it's a comedy of errors. Jerry as a protagonist embodies something I adore in crime drama storytelling: the archetypal every-man getting way in over his head in the criminal underworld. Usually this kind of setup is intended to give us an audience surrogate throughout the story. Jerry discovers the underbelly of criminal society along with the audience, drama ensues, and perhaps eventually the day is won through sheer grit and a dash of cunning. This isn't the intention of Fargo, of course. Jerry is not meant to be relatable or understandable, or sympathetic. He's shy, a poor liar, prideful, and downright stupid. He embodies the every-man only in the sense that you, me, or any other random person on the street would be just as in over our heads if we were in the same situation as him.

What ultimately makes this a black comedy rather than a traditionally compelling drama is that Jerry has gotten into this situation by himself. Through his own actions does the entire plot occur, and through his own actions does the plot continue to spiral out of control. That's the only thing close to a punchline that Fargo has in its comedic bow: that people die, get beaten, kidnapped, and worse, all because Jerry was too proud to admit to his wife, father in law, or whoever, that he needs help. Fargo isn't being funny with jokes, its being funny with irony, cringe inducing performances, and dry wit. It's probably one of the reasons why, if you scroll through your favorite movie review website you'll undoubtedly find folks who don't see the humor in anything happening. Even folks that like dry humor can have a hard time understanding why Fargo is supposed to be a gutbuster when all it's doing is using incredibly dry and minimalist cinematography to tell a story about an unlikable person. For me, anyway, it's how all of those elements come together into a masterwork of the dry and uncomfortable that Fargo horseshoes around to being hysterical. One of my favorite scenes is the scene when Jerry is leaving the diner and someone asks him how his son, Scotty, is handling the whole “mother being kidnapped” thing and Jerry responds with shock as its clear that his son was not a part of his plan at all. To me, that's hysterical. You were so dead set on this plan but didn't think of what to tell your own son about what happened to his mom? Absolutely farcical.

Filling in the gaps of all this dry cringe comedy is the entire Midwestern setting. Part of the gag of Fargo is how terrible everything is that's happening but any bystanders that come across the situation can only smile and nod and exchange pleasantries. The whole “smile through the cruelty” is, I'm sure, a wonderful commentary on how the Midwestern custom of overbearing politeness create a society that either represses its true feelings or ignores greater evils, but to a person who has barely stepped foot outside of NYS, it comes off as comically absurd. That's probably as close as Fargo gets to that classic pie in the face comedy, the fact that the world is falling to pieces but all anyone in this setting has to say about it is “hey there, ho there, oh ya, bit of a pickle there!”

But of course, it isn't until the very end that all of this is put into perspective, or to once again reinforce my point, Fargo isn't funny until it is. It's the scene where Marge is driving Peter Stormare's character where Fargo finally drops its mask and lays out its intentions. Marge's dialogue practically punches the audience in the face with its bluntness: “And for what? For a little bit of money?” Yeah. The entirety of Fargo happened because Jerry needed money and instead of taking the reasonable way out, he takes the sinister way out, and for that his ultimate fate is the death of his wife, the death of his father in law, multiple deaths of people he doesn't even know, and being arrested in Bismark, crying like a baby in his underwear. It's bleak, it's macabre, it's tragic... but what else can I do but laugh?