Lawrence Kasden's regrettably underseen I Love You to Death, from 1990, is almost always described as a "black comedy." Yep. Okay. Got it. Err…but what the hell is a black comedy, anyway? The Merriam Webster dictionary defines it as "humor marked by the use of usually morbid, ironic, grotesquely comic episodes." This seems pretty straightforward, right? But poke around a little more and complications arise. The Oxford English Dictionary reminds us that the use of "black" in this sense dates from 1583 and involves the idea of "dark or deadly purposes, malignant; pertaining to or involving death, deadly; baneful, disastrous, sinister." Ah, I see. But…this raises another question: is the use of "black" in "black comedy" intended to signal that it's a baneful enterprise partaking in dark and deadly purposes (because some people don't find this kind of stuff all that funny), or that it stands as a corrective to those purposes, perhaps in the way that a vaccination uses a harmful agent to prevent harm from that agent?
Whistling At the Graveyard: "I Love You to Death"
Whistling At the Graveyard: "I Love You to…
Whistling At the Graveyard: "I Love You to Death"
Lawrence Kasden's regrettably underseen I Love You to Death, from 1990, is almost always described as a "black comedy." Yep. Okay. Got it. Err…but what the hell is a black comedy, anyway? The Merriam Webster dictionary defines it as "humor marked by the use of usually morbid, ironic, grotesquely comic episodes." This seems pretty straightforward, right? But poke around a little more and complications arise. The Oxford English Dictionary reminds us that the use of "black" in this sense dates from 1583 and involves the idea of "dark or deadly purposes, malignant; pertaining to or involving death, deadly; baneful, disastrous, sinister." Ah, I see. But…this raises another question: is the use of "black" in "black comedy" intended to signal that it's a baneful enterprise partaking in dark and deadly purposes (because some people don't find this kind of stuff all that funny), or that it stands as a corrective to those purposes, perhaps in the way that a vaccination uses a harmful agent to prevent harm from that agent?