Unlike some of the Coen's lighter films like The Big Lebowski and Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? (also favorites of mine), a sense of bleakness pervades Fargo. The characters themselves are believable, yet subtly exaggerated to create a symphony of near-characatures. It is easy to laugh at the police officer's stamp-designing husband, her quintessentially mid-western regard for the atrocities of the murder investigation, and the bizarre and tense dynamic between Steve Busciemi's chattery character and his less than amiable partner in crime played by Peter Stormare. We even laugh when the wife of William H. Macy's character runs frantically through the house to save her life and when Peter Stormare attempts to dispose of her body in the wood chipper. Perhaps the funniest moment of this film is the scene in the end of the movie when Officer Gunderson has apprehended Peter Stormare's character and lectures him from the driver's seat of the squad car in the maternal tone that only a pregnant mid-westerner could master.
This film is filled with these hilarious and disturbing situations, which leads me to believe that one of the characteristics of this genre is that works should make us laugh at uncomfortable and real situations, rather than fantastical or unlikely ones presented in some works of farce like the sketch comedy of Benny Hill and Monty Python.
