Four Lions is Not a Black Comedy, but it is pretty funny
Netflix has a bad habit of lying to me. Four Lions is dark? Please. Four Lions couldn’t pass a brown paper bag test. It might be hilarious, but it’s not black. Here is why. I admit that black humor is a complicated beast. It gets easy to quickly characterize things as black or not based […]
The Details, an actually black comedy
Good black comedies are hard to come by. Perhaps it is because any book, television show, or film that is both funny and includes something universally viewed as ‘bad’ is immediately relegated to the ranks. Someone dies? Black comedy. Someone gets dumped? Yeah, that’s probably black. Oh wait, does it include the government or anything […]
Lederhosen
“Mother dumped my father,” a friend of my wife’s was saying one day, “all because of a pair of shorts.” …is how Murakami’s “Lederhosen” starts out, and from the title and beginning it appears like it will be in Murakami’s signature style: unsettling, deadpan, ridiculous. Like Kafka drawn in crayon. It isn’t, however, it is […]
Litost
There is no English translation for litost. It is a Czech word, and if Milan Kundera says there is no English translation for it, well then I would be a fool to try and find one myself. I trust Milan; he’s one of the smartest guys I’ve read. He’s also one of the most introspective […]
