15 Extremely Violent Characters Who Are Low-Key Comedic Geniuses

The Sopranos hitman Paulie "Walnuts" Gualtieri (Tony Sirico) is as quick with a quip as he is with a pistol. Indeed, that's part of the fun. He kills many, many people as a trusted lieutenant for crew leader Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) throughout the show's six seasons. But the levity of the character makes him weirdly endearing to his audience.

A good example of the duality of Paulie occurs in "I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano," the 13th and final episode of the show's first season. Paulie and Christopher (Michael Imperioli) are pursuing Mikey Palmice (Al Sapienza) through a leafy suburban forest, determined to kill him after Tony discovers that he and his boss Uncle Junior Soprano (Dominic Chianese) - as well as Tony's mother Livia (Nancy Marchand) - were behind a recent attempt on Tony's life. Paulie runs through some poison ivy and can't help but kvetch and pick at the subsequent rash, even as he and Christopher gain the high ground against Mikey and brutally murder him. Like a lot of characters on the show, Paulie is an amoral psychopath, but a pretty funny one.

The most memorable gangster movies (and certain gangster television shows) often benefit from breaking up some of their understandably bleak murder montages with tactical pepperings of character-based comedy.

Along these lines, one of the greatest comic performances ever arrives in the form of Joe Pesci's Oscar-winning turn as Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas (1990). Short in stature but big in confidence, Tommy is a web of contradictions. A crack-up at dinners with an itchy trigger finger, Tommy can go from mother-appreciating jokester to friend-murdering maniac within seconds. "You're a funny guy," his comrade Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) tells him in perhaps Tommy's most memorable moment. Henry and Tommy are enjoying some adult beverages in smart suits with their mob cohorts in a preferred haunt, the Bamboo Lounge, and had been chuckling about one of Tommy's many entertaining anecdotes. Tommy suddenly flips to deadly serious mode. "Funny how? I mean, what's funny about it?"

Suddenly, the laughter percolating around Tommy's story disappears completely. The mood has shifted. Everyone knows what this line of inquiry could lead to. "I mean, I'm funny how? I'm funny like a clown? Like I'm here to amuse you?" Tommy continues to berate Henry, who tries to defend his compliment, explaining that he enjoys the way Tommy tells his tales. Things get tense. 

There is a pregnant pause.

Henry calls his friend's bluff, and the mood lifts. Tommy was trying to freak Henry out. But we certainly know that Tommy, a fount of barely contained rage in his better moments, is capable of doing anything to almost anyone, friend or not. We later witness similar instances of Tommy's wrath against supposed allies (and a few foes he perhaps shouldn't cross) in several memorable subsequent scenes.

Cyrus "The Virus" Grissom (John Malkovich) is one of the funniest evil geniuses ever. Like many of the brilliant actors on this list, John Malkovich manages to strike a delicate balance between comedy and intensity as the boss con of Con Air. We discover that Cyrus became a man of letters while incarcerated, but lost none of his lethality, murdering fellow inmates and stirring up trouble even before his coordinated midair hostile takeover.

Never one to shy away from dissing his criminal colleagues or threatening the life of a stuffed bunny rabbit - the intended gift of movie hero Cameron Poe (Nicolas Cage) for his kid daughter - Cyrus is a ruthless tyrant whose comedy (his impromptu song about the murder of an undercover DEA agent on board the plane is actually pretty catchy) never obscures his cruelty. That said, he's a pretty broad character in a pretty broad movie.

Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), the anarchic id who operates as the unleashed split personality of our office drone Fight Club (1999) narrator (Edward Norton), is both a terrifying terrorist and a nihilistic humorist, oftentimes all at once. Especially funny is the flippant way he treats his cadre of Fight Club fanatics - dedicated blue-collar followers who will do anything he wants, even when his concepts of discipline are relentlessly extreme. He wears flashy rock-and-roll attire, steals whatever he wants, and loves to chew loudly in phone conversations.

An excitingly dangerous sort, Tyler Durden is what happens when Gen X gets utterly burned out on capitalism. His mid-movie rallying cry to his Fight Club brethren is at once funny, sad, and heartbreakingly astute:

Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. Godd**n it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy s**t we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very p****d off.

Corporate raider/deranged cannibal/obsessive Phil Collins fan Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), as realized in Mary Harron’s brilliant American Psycho (2000), represents an achingly on-point parody of a certain kind of amoral yuppie who continues to more or less run rampant - even today. Bateman, of course, takes things to an obscene extreme, exploiting the evils of enterprise while simultaneously crying for help via a killing spree.

Bateman is prone to rambling Rolling Stone magazine-channeling reviews of the disposable pop records of his day, frequently delivered to his victims during their last moments of life. He’s also a big fan of a well-made business card.

By 2006, Jack Nicholson the actor had been more or less subsumed by Jack Nicholson the movie star in the popular consciousness. So it only made sense that his last great performance to date was in Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning crime masterpiece The Departed (2006) as Frank Costello, a fairly accurate fictionalization of real-life Irish Boston crime boss Whitey Bulger, still a fugitive at large at the time of the movie's release. Scorsese, like Nicholson, has always been a master when it comes to balancing comedy and violence.

We witness the unraveling of Frank Costello and his empire throughout the movie. After he recruits Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) to infiltrate the Massachusetts State Police as a star cadet, Frank soon realizes that Boston's finest may have one of their own infiltrating his operation, too. Indeed they do, and it's Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), one of Frank's trusted young lieutenants. Soon, everyone's paranoia is (justifiably) on the rise. Frank, always one to dish out comic gestures at deeply inappropriate times, takes to wearing luxurious bathrobes, leaning into weird prop comedy, consuming exorbitant amounts of cocaine, and impersonating rats. Nicholson takes the Jack Torrance/Jack Napier approach here, effectively Nicholsoning it up just as much as we would hope in a performance that is at once bitingly funny and deeply disturbing. Never for one minute do we forget just how lethal this guy is, even in the midst of the yuks.