This chapter investigates the evolving contours of dark comedy in literature, foregrounding its power to confront environmental and societal crises with both irreverence and insight. Rather than offering mere comic relief, dark comedy functions as an incisive mode of critique, exposing the contradictions, hypocrisies, and failures embedded in human systems and cultural narratives. Drawing on literary works from Aristophanes to Atwood, and engaging theorists such as Bakhtin and Critchley, the chapter traces how the genre fuses laughter and unease to probe the absurdities of human behavior—particularly in the context of ecological collapse and the Capitalocene. The discussion grounds itself in classical antecedents—Aristophanes’ biting satires, Plautus’s tragicomic vices, and Shakespeare’s use of gallows humor—before moving to contemporary texts like Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Ian McEwan’s Solar, and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange. Here, dark comedy emerges as a method for disarming eco-anxiety, lowering psychological defenses, and inviting readers to reflect critically on their own complicity in environmental harm. Satire, irony, parody, and the grotesque are revealed as core mechanisms, enabling writers to balance entertainment with sharp critique and to render catastrophe thinkable—sometimes even actionable. The chapter pays special attention to the ways in which dark comedy destabilizes the guilt-driven, moralizing tone of much environmental literature. Instead, it embraces ambiguity, surprise, and catharsis, offering space for reflection, collective laughter, and even hope amid crisis. By drawing on psychological studies of humor and the social dynamics of laughter, the analysis demonstrates how dark comedy’s irreverence can foster emotional resilience and cultivate new forms of ecological consciousness. Ultimately, this chapter asserts that dark comedy is not a literary luxury, but a necessary tool for imagining—and surviving—the complexities of the present ecological moment.