Dry humor can be a useful tool for a filmmaker, but there are several directors who stand out by pushing it to its limits. Deadpan comedy is defined by its inherent lack of emotion. Often, this is a counterpoint to the absurdity of what’s being said, or the strange situation that the characters find themselves in.
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While dry wit can be hilarious, it has plenty of other uses. A shocking jolt of comedy can enhance other emotions, which is why dry wit often pops up in horror movies and crime thrillers. This provides something unexpected for the audience to chew on, and it recontextualizes the action. When used intelligently, deadpan humor can create layered jokes that deconstruct the artifice of film and speak to the common foibles of humanity.
You are watching: 10 Directors That Take Dry Humor To The Next Level In Their Movies
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David Lynch
Lynch’s Dark Style Contains Some Esoteric Comedy
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David Lynch’s surreal style can often leave audiences feeling uneasy or confused, but this routinely proves to be a great way to deliver some startling dry humor too. By juxtaposing the abstract with the everyday, Lynch frequently creates incongruous images that cast the ordinary aspects of modern American life in a new light.
Lynch frequently creates incongruous images that cast the ordinary aspects of modern American life in a new light.
Lynch’s comedy derives from the realization of things out of place. He takes delight in setting up patterns and willfully subverting them, just as he also has a tendency to create oddly relatable moments out of off-the-wall scenarios. To give just one example, the look of startled panic often plastered on Henry’s face in Eraserhead looks like many new parents.
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Yorgos Lanthimos
Lanthimos’ Harsh Atmospheres Are Perfect For Dark Comedy
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Yorgos Lanthimos’ movies each share his peculiar atmosphere, with characters talking in deliberately stilted dialogue and their facial expressions limited to steely neutrality. It’s no wonder that he has cast Colin Farrell multiple times, and also that Emma Stone has become his go-to actor in recent years. Their long-running partnership is continuing in 2025 with Bugonia.
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Lanthimos’ stories are often designed to shock his audience, but his characters reply with muted expressions. Poor Things is probably his most confronting movie so far, but Stone maintains a wide-eyed stare during even the most explicit and disgusting scenes. This dissonance is often hilarious, but it’s also true that laughter is the only cathartic response to something so disturbing.
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The Coen Brothers
The Coens’ Crime Comedies Overflow With Deadpan Wit
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Many of the best Coen brothers movies are dark crime comedies, including Fargo, Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski. The Coens mine a lot of humor from the disconnect between their characters and the violent, dangerous nature of the situations they find themselves in. Luckily, they always cast the perfect actors in these roles.
Jeff Bridges’ role in The Big Lebowski is representative of the Coens’ wicked sense of humor. He’s a regular, laidback man – as evidenced by his nickname, the Dude – but he’s drawn deeper and deeper into a kidnapping plot with potentially fatal consequences. His natural response to the eccentric characters he meets is to shrug his shoulders and go bowling.
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Jim Jarmusch
Jarmusch’s Sense Of Humor Is One Of Few Constants In His Career
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Jim Jarmusch’s career as a director has been marked by his refusal to bend to the conventions of filmmaking. He repeatedly ventures into unfamiliar genres and deconstructs them from the inside out, or he takes on bold narrative stunts to question the dogmatic boundaries of storytelling. His deadpan humor is always in his arsenal, helping him mock convention.
Jarmusch’s characters frequently say the most outlandish and absurd things without showing any emotion. This reaches its peak in The Dead Don’t Die in which a trio of small-town cops attempt to take on a zombie apocalypse with the same energy as if they were handing out parking fines or investigating a missing pet.
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Stanley Kubrick
Kubrick Mixes Dry Humor Into A Variety Of Genres
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Stanley Kubrick’s filmography shows that he can excel in whatever genre he chooses. Of course, Dr. Strangelove is a comedic masterpiece, thanks to a blindingly brilliant performance from Peter Sellers playing three different characters, but humor runs throughout Kubrick’s other movies.
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There’s a dark humor to many scenes in The Shining, for example, like when Hallorann flies across the country to help Danny, only to be murdered as soon as he arrives. HAL-9000 also has an air of deadpan wit in his rebuttals to Dave in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Bill Harford bumps into plenty of eccentric characters on his strange journey in Eyes Wide Shut. Some of Kubrick’s funniest moments get more laughs the longer you think about them.
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Martin McDonagh
McDonagh’s Dark Humor Is Remarkably Blunt
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Whether on stage or on screen, Martin McDonagh’s works push dry humor to its limits and beyond. His directorial debut, In Bruges is a deadpan masterpiece, and the image of two hitmen passing the time in a quaint European city has come to describe the way that McDonagh often juxtaposes violence and brutality with the mundane.
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Martin McDonagh’s Movies |
||
|
Movie |
Rotten Tomatoes Score |
IMDb Score |
|
In Bruges (2008) |
84% |
7.9 |
|
Seven Psychopaths (2012) |
82% |
7.1 |
|
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) |
90% |
8.1 |
|
The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) |
96% |
7.7 |
While McDonagh’s dialogue offers up plenty of snappy back-and-forths, he has also shown that he can get laughs from moments of action. One of the funniest moments in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri comes when Sam Rockwell’s hotheaded cop nonchalantly strolls into an office building and throws a man out of a second-floor window, with McDonagh’s camera following him every step of the way.
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Quentin Tarantino
Tarantino’s Movies Juxtapose With Violence With Humor
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Quentin Tarantino has made crime dramas, action movies and Westerns, but comedy is a secondary genre in pretty much everything he does. Reservoir Dogs – Tarantino’s debut feature – highlights his ability to deliver shocking humor, especially with Michael Madsen’s tonally inappropriate dance. This was just the beginning for Tarantino.
Tarantino’s movies are rife with characters acting inappropriately in the face of grave danger, and he often undercuts the tension of a scene with something ludicrous. Take, for example, Cliff Booth pointing a finger-gun at a member of the Manson family seconds away from executing him in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, or Christopher Walken showing up for a single monologue about a man hiding a watch in his rectum in Pulp Fiction. These deadpan gags add to the sheer entertainment value of Tarantino’s style.
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Guy Ritchie
Ritchie Embodies British Humor
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British humor can often be extremely dry, so it’s no surprise that one of the country’s best directors of comedy has mastered this particular art. From his early successes in the gangster genre, Guy Ritchie has shown a flair for subverting expectations with a stroke of deadpan wit. He has an obsession with criminal characters who are surprisingly erudite and well-spoken.
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As much as Ritchie’s style is known for its shocking bursts of violence and hair-raising action, his dry humor is just as important. He usually gets the best out of actors like Jason Statham, Vinnie Jones and Henry Cavill, who can all play tough guys, but who also have impeccable comedic timing and an affable swagger.
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Jordan Peele
Peele’s Comedic Roots Can Be Seen In His Horror Movies
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Before he decided to become one of the best horror directors in the business, Jordan Peele was famous as a comedian alongside Keegan-Michael Key. Fans of Key & Peele will know that the sketches often had elements of cinematic horror, so it’s no surprise that Peele’s horror movies retain some of his deadpan humor. Peele’s comedy and horror projects aren’t as dissimilar as they may seem.
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Even the tensest and most frightening moments in Peele’s movies have elements of comedy. Just look at Chris’ reaction in Get Out when Rose doesn’t give him the car keys, or Gabe’s code-switching posturing when the Tethered arrive in the middle of the night in Us. Peele knows as well as anyone else that comedy and horror are both about surprising the audience, and there’s nothing as surprising as a hilarious joke when characters are fighting for their lives.
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Wes Anderson
Anderson’s Favorite Actors Match His Peculiar Style
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Wes Anderson reigns as one of the deadpan greats in the current landscape of film comedy. His characters are often eccentric and hard to relate to, but they speak with a matter-of-fact style that naturally lends itself to dry wit. Anderson likes to keep a cast of regulars on rotation who key into his style, including Tilda Swinton, Owen Wilson and Bill Murray.
Anderson likes to keep a cast of regulars on rotation who key into his style.
Wes Anderson’s movies are known for their idiosyncratic style, but his flat shot compositions and blank-faced characters don’t negate the emotion in his movies. He often writes about father-son dynamics, large communities falling apart and individuals searching for meaning, but these individuals have to continue their search in a world that seems comedically hostile toward them at every turn.
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Category: Entertainment