Starting form a trend observed in the Italian dubbing of US series Six Feet Under (Bucaria 2005) involving the deletion or toning down of most instances of potentially disturbing elements, this paper takes into consideration examples from three US TV series (House MD, Nip/Tuck and Six Feet Under) dubbed into Italian and presenting a mixture of drama and comedy, in an attempt to analyze the degree of manipulation or adaptation that they underwent in terms of the linguistic representation of clashing genres. With particular reference to the rendering of humorous comments produced in unexpected contexts, the analysis shows considerable manipulation in the translated versions and a consequent decrease in the humorous content of the target texts.