We here at Dirge are avowed devotees of the darkly funny. It’s in the tag line! Your standard gallows humor is great, but it’s a very special treat when someone’s earnest warning turns out to be blackly comic. The people who made the following public service announcements lacked enough ironic distance to consider that incongruously gratuitous violence might read as absurd, or that a repeated shot of a literal rag doll being crushed by a dresser might get exponentially funnier each time you see it. These PSAs were really trying to help, and that’s kind of the best part?
Prevent-It.ca
As you might be able to glean from that url, these videos hail from a Canadian workplace safety initiative. They’re all super gruesome, and the juxtaposition of the hyper-realistic violence with chipper narration is supposed to be horrifying. It’s also comedy gold. Pro tip: if you’re not trying to make me lose my shit, don’t film a lady falling 15 feet through a glass shelf and staggering to her feet covered in blood to say, “Welp, shouldn’t have done that.”
Aside from the grotesque absurdity of dead bodies coming back to life to bitch about inadequate safety policies, the timing is just so perfect in these. They’re all masterful, but especially the one where the guy gets blown off the building mid-sentence. What, did fucking Tex Avery return from the grave to storyboard these?
No Hope with Dope
Hey, speaking of returning from the grave, here’s an undead funeral professional to talk to you about the drugs. Friends, I don’t know if you’ve been moving about the world thinking that there might be hope with dope, but if you have, I’m going to have to burst your bubble. There’s no hope with dope, and you know how I know? I heard it from pro wrestling’s most decorated goth dad while he was literally digging my grave.
This video is short and sweet, but it’s not a patch on what is surely the greatest, most incongruous drug PSA moment of all time: a teen reading a D.A.R.E.-quality story about being trapped in a casket following her own NON-SPECIFIC DRUG DEATH and her family’s anguish. Her essay is then punctuated by the appearance of The Undertaker. For the uninitiated, ‘Taker is a seven foot Old West coffin maker possessed by some kind of eldritch spirit, and he’s probably burned more people alive on television than executed wrist locks. As soon as the cameras stopped running he probably dropped this wholesome teen on her fucking head and buried her alive, possibly because there’s little-to-no hope with dope. Here it is, in photo essay form:
Boys Beware!
https://youtu.be/MEBYc8oCGt8
This film, financed by the brain trust at the Inglewood Police Department, posits a Jack Chick-style nightmare world where middle-aged gay men cruise around picking up all-American lads with abandon. To put it as indelicately as possible, they’re much more interested in Jerry Mathers than in the beaver.
The funniest thing about this — apart from the frankly absurd notion of lawless gangs of middle-aged homosexuals prowling Eisenhower’s America — is the fact that none of them looklike Jack Chick’s nightmare gays. They all kind of look like Andy Bellefleur in an unconvincing John Waters costume. That’s probably what the actual Jack Chick looks like, or what he looked like before he was a hateful brain in a mayonnaise jar.
IKEA’s Crash Test Dressers
Okay. Let me start by saying that it’s not funny that actual children got killed by improperly-mounted Scandinavian furniture. However, the Consumer Safety Products Commission’s response to that tragedy — hosting a press conference where stoic men in lab coats somberly crushed dolls under dressers — is fucking art.
The whole thing isn’t online because there’s no God, but you can find dozens of still photos of literal faceless rag dolls in sundresses hanging in midair, perpetually about to be pulverized by pressboard and brushed steel. Even better, the fine folks at the CSPC were filming melodramatic dresser safety videos before anyone was hurt by a MALM. I can’t decide what’s funnier: foleying in an explosion for the slow-motion crash, or rigging the dresser to fall on the camera like it’s The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
MALM.
MAAAAAALM.
The Life You Save
Look, kids! It’s 30 year-old mopey teen icon James Dean, and he’s here to teach us all about highway safety! Now, those of us living here in the future know that James Dean giving driving advice is like Elvis filming a PSA about not taking fistfuls of barbiturates on the toilet. Gig Young’s the host, but this thing is so loaded with dark irony that he may as well be Rod Serling.
Despite this, the irony isn’t even the weirdest thing about this segment. James is in full costume because he was in the middle of filming Giant, but it’s bizarre to see the guy shyly stumble through what’s ostensibly a heartfelt plea dressed as a fucking cowboy. Plus, he’s got a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Drive safe and smoke up, kids!
The Friend
https://youtu.be/ZCKW4H3Ap44
Alice was just a regular girl in the Year of Our Lord 2011 when she got some mysterious calls from a sinister voice that’s working its community theater-best Kevin Spacey impression. The voice knew her favorite movie, her favorite singer, her phone number, and even her address. The killer learned these facts — apparently the only four things you need to know to murder someone — from Facebook.
She calls her mom in a panic, but her mom grew up in a more innocent time, when threatening phone calls were hilarious pranks and people’s numbers and addresses were straight-up listed in the phone book. Alice gets murdered via produce bag, teaching all of us a valuable lesson: If a social media stalker finds out that your favorite movie is Mean Girls and your favorite singer is Avril Lavigne, he’s actually been reading your Myspace.
The Beating
This one is supposed to be funny, just absolutely not in the way that it actually is. A lad snoozes through an admittedly dull lecture, only to be jolted awake by a teacher screaming like a Doctor Who monster that has revealed it’s an alien but hasn’t yet shed its human disguise. The entire class stares bug-eyed as the professor prepares to beat Slumbery Joe with a yardstick.
But just kidding! You won’t suffer an actual, physical beating because of dozing off in algebra, you’ll simply be beaten by life. There’s a fucking SMASH CUT to this kid as a homeless derelict carrying out unsolicited windshield-cleanings for guilt tips at a red light. That’s such an absurdly precipitous decline. Shit, if falling asleep in class wrecked your future that hard, I’d be a skeleton clutching a tip jar thanks to that one semester I had a double-length bio class with super plush theater seating right after lunch.
