Ah the 80s

So, the 15th anniversary showing of Heathers is on. I can't count the number of times I've seen that show. There was a period of time where I had just about that entire movie memorized. Which makes watching it on the WB quite painful as they've been axing dialogue left and right (I can't believe they cut the "loose was too noose" line! I mean really...). It was something of a cult favorite among my group of friends in High School. It certainly fits the whole angsty teenager bill... Part of what we liked was the fact that it was so quotable. Little snippets of dialogue that just begged to be bantered back and forth. It's probably one of the first black comedies that I can remember seeing. A couple worthwhile messages wrapped safely in sarcasm, Winona Ryder and Christian Slater. What more could a teeanger at the end of the 80s ask for?

I've got a bit of a love/hate relationship with black comedies. I suppose it depends on the subject matter. I absolutely loathed The War of the Roses, but Falling Down was pretty good. Roses just depressed me. I couldn't stand watching them fall out of love and destroy each other. Marriage means enough to me that the humor was lost and it just became depressing and vulgar. Falling Down however did a decent job of showing us the ordinary guy just losing it completely.

When I was in college I took a class on humor my senior year. It was an interesting class and it covered a few varieties of humor including black comedy. In fact, I want to say that Heathers was at least touched on during that portion. Humor is one of those things that people really only sort of understand. While it has admittedly been a while since the class, I don't remember thinking we ever had a real definite statement as to what humor was, or what made something funny. I think that's one of the most important aspects of humor. It tends to arise from a sudden unexpected event, but you can't really pin it down too well. It's like the old adage - you kill a joke by explaining it. Humor suffers something from trying to understand it too much. The joke is dead, long live the joke...