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Article Excerpt
THE GREAT GOD OF LAUGHTER, his sides forever split, is not pleased by black comedies, for the simple reason that they tend not to be very funny. The comedy of blackness is usually a kind of local anesthetic, something frozen, producing not humor but a dead-skinned tolerance for the horrible; and there is no situation so ghastly that it cannot be made worse by a bad joke.
In the opening scene of Burr Steers' debut Igby Goes Down, two well-dressed young men--one slouched, one poised--are sitting on their mother's deathbed. They are waiting for her to expire and they are getting restless. She's unconscious, but she won't go. The breath drains from her body in long, quavering snores--each one a lament, a recessional, an adieu--but she won't go. The boys consult their watches, swear peevishly and curse their mother's constitution ("[Too much] fucking tennis!"), but still she won't go. So they decide to speed things up by putting a plastic bag over her head. Ha ha! Or,...
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