Dark Humour in FAH Sketches

If you’ve ever gone on a deep dive into the Foil Arms and Hog YouTube channel, you might have come across sketches such as “The Baby Head Clamp”, “Celebrity Lock Up”, or “The Disco”. And if it’s your first glimpse of their old material, you might be surprised at how dark their humour was – very different from their witty, quick-paced Word Play series, or the heart-warming yet hilarious antics of Oisin and Anne Flanagan.

So: let’s talk about dark humour in FAH sketches.

A brief introduction to dark humour
Humour is considered black or dark when it makes light of taboo subjects, especially those typically considered serious or painful – jokes about discrimination, violence, mutilation or death tend to fall into this category. The use of this kind of humour is in no way particular to the modern age: the first proper studies of dark humour as a full genre date back to Ancient Greece.

And why do we like dark humour, if it makes fun of topics we consider to be serious? Well, dark humour is widely recognised as a coping mechanism, a way to acknowledge and talk about subjects that, when discussed from a serious point of view, evoke pity, terror, sadness and other similarly negative feelings. As the French writer Boris Vian very succinctly put it, “l’humour est la politesse du désespoir”: humour is desperation’s politeness''. ''

According to Freud, who took a special interest in the “inner workings” of this particular brand of humour, laughing at these serious matters allows us to relieve the pent-up tension we accumulate in regard to them, without giving in to any of those negative feelings. In that sense, one could argue that, after experiencing a traumatic event, it's just as cathartic to joke about it than to cry about it.

Dark humour can arise from a wide array of situations; anecdotes of dark humour being used as a coping mechanism can be found in victims of intense episodic oppression, like prisoners in concentration camps during WWII, but also in victims of a more day-to-day kind of oppression, like African-Americans.

(A particularly amusing survival anecdote is that of the HMS Sheffield, a warship that was sunk during the Falklands War, where the few survivors waiting to be rescued were found singing and whistling along to Monty Python’s song “Always look on the Bright Side of Life”, from the movie Life of Brian; the epitome of laughing in the face of death.)

Despite being justified in its existence for all the reasons above, dark humour, by definition, treads a fine line. The mocking tone it portrays only works if it's in a sort of self-deprecating way; that is to say, a joke about African American oppression is appropriate as long as the person who conveys the joke is African American themselves. That person will have experienced that brand of oppression, so it's an educated joke that doesn't perpetuate an oppressive dynamic: the member of that oppressed group is "giving us permission" to laugh at the subject, so we're laughing with them, not at them.

But if a Caucasian person jokes about African American oppression, it's no longer an educated joke, since the person who is telling it has no personal experience on the matter. That would automatically transform the joke into a tool that furthers that oppression, by mocking the oppressed’s suffering.

Of course, this line isn't always as clear as the example we've given, and that's why most content creators tend to stay away from it, especially on online platforms, where everything can be recorded for prosperity; we all know how jokes that were once considered appropriate and funny can turn sour in the space of weeks, let alone years.

FAH and dark humour
Foil, Arms and Hog openly acknowledge that they’ve moved away from their old, edgy-humour ways, at least in regard to the content they post on their YouTube channel. We can see an example of this in the video “Top 10 Sketches 2009-2019”, after watching the first video they uploaded to their channel, “Green Issues” (timestamp 28:40):


 * Arms: “God, we were way more hardcore back then.”


 * Foil: “That’s giving me the most laughs of everything! (…) We’ve just gotten worse with time!” (sic)

So, if you think the humour in their online sketches has mellowed over the years, the lads will probably agree with you (even though Arms can still get a bit feisty when responding to comments – check out his best snarky remarks here [insert link]).

Before we dig into the dark depths of the FAH YouTube channel: if you think our list is missing a FAH sketch you consider to be dark, let us know in the comments below!