Ali Wong and Steven Yeun's Beef on Netflix is epic—and proof that dark comedy is peaking

What begins as bad choices on a bad day spirals into an epic vendetta that lasts months and sweeps up everyone they know or care about into a bloody vortex. It’s no house of clowns: Amy’s not-as-talented-as-he-thinks artist husband George and snarky mother-in-law Fumi, Danny’s himbo brother Paul and the dangerous, reckless cousin Isaac, Amy’s to-be (white) boss Jordan who preaches zugzwang to her Asian audience and Danny’s arch-nemesis, the praise choir leader Edwin. No one’s a saint here, but no one’s quite wholly a sinner either.

This dysfunctional dynamic is the landscape through which Jin runs a rake and weeds out some of the driest, most acidic comedy on screens at the moment. But like everything else that is billed as a comedy-drama in the English-speaking world these days—Succession to The White Lotus, Ted Lasso to Atlanta—Beef doesn’t want to offer you the quick relief of a setup-to-punch line joke. Instead, it is part of the great tradition called dark comedy: Where the laughs stem from the painful, the serious, the taboo.

‘Dark comedy’ has its roots in the Great Depression of the 1930s, in a world reeling from war, financial meltdown and devastation at an unprecedented scale. The Surrealist theorist Andre Breton coined the French term ‘humour noir’—black comedy—and later, in the 1940s, even put out an anthology of writings, from Jonathan Swift to Edgar Allan Poe, Frank Kafka to Marcel Duchamp, that took an “attitude” to their broken world. It took the form of “both a lampooning of social conventions and a profound disrespect for the nobility of literature,” as the translator Mark Polizzotti writes in his introduction.

Steven Yeun in Beef. (Screen grab/Netflix)

Dark comedy was a mainstay of literature and theatre for decades before popular cinema began to experiment with it. A first spike for dark comedy in films came in the 1960s, at the height of the nuclear anxiety, beginning with Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 “nightmare comedy” Dr Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Ever since he gave us the image of a cowboy hooting as he rides not a horse, but a nuclear bomb, filmmakers and creators have mined mankind’s collective worries for the “banal, the absurd, the incongruous.”

TV comedy, though, followed a slightly different arc. As The Guardian noted in a 2019 piece: “If 1990s sitcoms were characterised by sexually liberated pals cracking wise [F.R.I.E.N.D.S.], and the '00s by docu-realist, workplace-based cringe comedy [The Office], the 2010s have been dominated by the sadcom [Bojack Horseman, You’re The Worst], a strain of comedy-drama shuddering under the weight of personal hardship and the idea that actual jokes are largely unnecessary.”

A lot of this can be traced back to Adult Swim, the animated comedy block that has aired on Cartoon Network in the US since 2003, and bequeathed upon the world some timeless young adult-oriented gems such as Family Guy, Rick & Morty in a fray that also featured The Simpsons and South Park.
But in this decade, a new wave has established itself, says the article in The Guardian: “one that retains the sadcom’s essential bleakness, but overlays it with surreal settings, chaotically strange plotlines and jokes that ring with an erratic absurdity.” Sound familiar?

This is the world that some of modern prestige TV’s—an essentially post-genre phenomenon of the streaming era—most memorable characters inhabit. Think of Phoebe Waller Bridge’s grief-riddled Fleabag who rejects people and decimates the fourth wall with an I-have-nothing-left-to-lose abandon. Think of Bill Hader’s Barry, an ex-Marine turned mercenary who numbly murders people all over LA but really just wants to be an actor.

Think of the ensemble casts of Veep, The White Lotus, Succession and Ted Lasso, all of whom navigate extraordinary circumstances. A comically-vain politician and her inefficient, but rabidly ambitious staff.  A group of strangers on holiday whose baggage is so much more than what they carry in their monogrammed suitcases. The “friends and family” of one of the most powerful media men on the planet, none of whom he really trusts. An underdog football team being coached by a labrador of a man from Kansas. But in each case, these log lines are just the gateway into the clash of egos and the worst human instincts.

Ashley Park as Naomi in Beef. (Screen grab/Netflix)

Think also of Bad Sisters, a show about five sisters trying to rid themselves of one evil husband. Of Dead to Me, Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini’s dance around death, deceit and despair. And then there are Beef’s Amy and Danny, both of whom actually have a lot more in common than they know going into this war for the ages: debilitating loneliness, the pressure of expectations, depression and anxiety. Morality has no place in this matrix.

There’s something of the bait-and-switch about all these shows. Dark comedies like Beef aren’t fast food, that nifty little cheeseburger you could swallow in 20 minutes with a gallon of laughter tracks and a side of happy endings. They are, instead, a seven-course meal at the chef’s table, inviting you to luxuriate in a slow roasting of the human condition, sampling a spectrum of emotions that our illogical world continues to evoke—where institutions continue to crumble and an apocalypse forever seems to lurk around the corner.

Critics have wondered if the dark comedy speaks especially to millennials: the guinea pig generation, the ones who inherited a simpler world and watched it contort beyond recognition. Making Beef, said its 38 year-old creator Lee Sung Jin to GQ recently, “the most cathartic thing for me was less about rage, and more about the kind of existential, empty feeling that the show talks about. For me, it’s always been there, and I know it’s never gonna go away. I think in making the show, the main takeaway was the burden of being alive [laughs]. The only way we can carry that is with other people, you really can’t do it alone.”

And when you really can’t do anything to “keep on keeping on”, the best you can do is laugh at your suffering. Buy houseplants because we’re too poor to have children. Nurture that slight from a stranger on the road because it gives you, “not a perfect person”, a “reason to start over new” as the great poet Doug Robb of Hoobastank put it 20 years ago.