grim humor

That friction creates much of the novel’s grim humor, which will be familiar to anyone whose favorite entertainment has an unavoidable human cost.

But he added with grim humor, “Maybe they are saving this tool.”

It’s an intense film, with long stretches of mortification punctuated with grim humor, concluding in a scene of agonizing victory: So drunk she can barely stand, Myrtle arrives hours late to the first night of her new play, delivering a chaotic and heroic performance which unravels and reshapes the production.

There is grim humor to scenes of France in the field, stage-directing refugees or Middle Eastern fighters on where to look and how to act for b-roll footage to fit what she needs, without much concern for what they are actually doing.

With grim humor, they glance at ugly facts of human existence — war, misogyny, household violence, racism, workplace exploitation — and pay special attention to Romania’s complicity in the two major forms of 20th-century totalitarianism.