Halloween may be around the corner, but last Friday night, Binghamton University’s Theatre Department entertained its audience with a taste of Christmas, in an adaptation of Anthony Neilson’s play “The Lying Kind.”

In the play, nitwit cops Blunt and Gobbel have one last job to do the night before Christmas: deliver some tragic news to an old couple in a London apartment. Attempting to save the couple’s Christmas, the constables try stalling, but doing so results in them facing grave moral questions and even graver disasters.

Director Carol Hanscom could have directed a safe, cliche Christmas stage show, like “A Christmas Carol” or “SantaLand Diaries.” Instead, Hanscom decided to take a risk with a British 21st-century black farce and a successful risk it was.

“The Lying Kind” is the type of play that students excel at, the type with a jumble of maniacal characters. There’s two knuckle-headed policemen, a deranged anti-pedophile “vigilante,” a stripper priest with sassy pink undergarments, a missing dog, a senile old woman who loves to show off her “bum,” an unlucky Chihuahua and a confused old man, to name a few.

Even in its most intense moments, the show was hilarious. Yes, we are talking about a show that brings up murder, pedophilia, death and aging, suicide, religion and morality. Characters constantly contradict each other, but the greatest contradictions are the sharp differences in tone. It’s so dark, yet so hilarious.

The dynamic between the two idiotic buddy cops — Gobbel, played by Eric Berger, and Blunt, played by Anthony Gabriele — is what makes the play tick. The actors worked well off each other by letting their characters work awfully with each other. They’re opposite on the surface, but deep down, they’re kindred spirits. Like Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum in “21 Jump Street,” or Jim Carey and Jeff Daniels in “Dumb and Dumber,” they’re working for the same goal, but at cross purposes and with cross personalities. Like one character says in “The Lying Kind”: “I thought we were going to help people, not ruin their lives.”

The director, set and sound designers, and actors do a good job in covering up the big moral questions and dark elements mentioned above through means of distraction. Jolly Christmas songs in between cut scenes, the accurate yet hard to comprehend heavy Cockney accent and lingo, extreme reactions, physical gestures and actions like a strip show, a “fight” scene and intense penis “groping” all take away from the morbidity of the situation. Although there are many characters, misconceptions and plot twists, Hanscom lets all these chaotic elements blend so that they are amusing, rather than a mess.

“The Lying Kind” will be on stage in the Chamber Hall of the Anderson Center at 8 p.m. this Friday, Oct. 24, and Saturday, Oct. 25. There will be an additional show at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 26. Tickets are $14. The show is “like some kind of nightmare” before Christmas that you won’t ever want to end.