Film posters as conveyors of dark humour: an English-Italian case study

This paper considers some of the posters and taglines used for a specific subgenre of film comedies, i.e. dark comedy, by looking at two of the most recent examples from the UK – which is considered by many as one of the contexts in which dark humour has flourished – namely Keeping Mum and Death at a Funeral. An analysis of the adaptation of the English-language posters of these comedies for the Italian audience is potentially interesting because of the differences in the tolerance for dark humour in Anglophone countries such as the UK and the US, and Italy, with Italy displaying lesser acceptance for humour directed at death and religion.