'After Hours' in the Afterlife: The Case for Paul Hackett's Hell In Martin Scorsese's 1985 black comedy, a man's desperate quest to get home after a night gone wrong is actually his eternal damnation. Warner Bros. In our monthly column Laughed to Death, we look at the way comedy and existentialism go hand-in-hand in seemingly unlikely ways. For this installment, Brianna Zigler makes the case for how Martin Scorsese’s 1985 black comedy After Hours discreetly portrays a dead man damned to his own endless eternity. “What do you want from me?” Paul Hackett shrieks to the heavens, to the black, neglectful, and uncaring abyss that hovers above and taunts him with silence, “What have I done? I’m just a word processor, for Christ’s sake!”