surreptitiously didactic
and expectantly bombastic
how can you not see the
problem when your so righteously
observant; can you not retent what
is

Final Paper Topic: Wes Anderson's progressive role in Dark Comedy

Wes Anderson is a relavtively knew name and face in the arena of darm comedy made for the big screen. His first movie "Bottle Rocket" was written and directed by him and was the first in a line of five other movies that he directed, wrote and produced. In his first movie Anderson seems to only dip into his well-stylized skewed humor. It is more of a flighty and odd story of misfits but lays a pretty solid foundation for the basis of what most of his movies would be grounded upon. I plan to write my final paper on how Anderson has used dark comedy to progress the modern use of irony and has made a distinct contribution to the genre. I want to show that Anderson has not just used dark comedy in his movies but has gone beyond simple utilization and has impacted the stylized humor through the use of film.

First Encounter with Dark Comedy

Jonathan Swifts "A Modest Proposal" was my first encounter with dark comedy my junior year of high school in one of my English classes. We were using the "Norton Sampler" and had to analyze the story as one of our first assignments. I remember reading it for the first time with a sort of grimace consisting purely of curiosity broken up by small grunts of laughter. At the time the only way I knew how to describe it was in terms of irony but I was didn't realize my laughter at such ominous ironic statements was really due to the darkly comedic asertions. I didn't know then of Dark Comedy as a type of literature or entertainment. In reading "A Modest Proposal" was a great introduction to dark comedy for me. It is riddled with carefully crafted satire but isn't too deeply complicated and can be brokendown into managable pieces for simple disection. It impacted me because it shed light for the first time on a different side of comedy that I could never quite sum up. Dark comedy allowed me to see that there can be comedy in any situation and that even the most absurd and sometimes tragic events can actually be humorous without any intent of being malicous. My relationship today with dark comedy is much more prevalent now that I have had more time to explore its odds and ends through many forms ( i.e. movies, books, plays, tv shows etc.) and have seen how it can contribute to literature and culture. I love dark comedy as it doesn't let you become lulled into a sense of false security or self imposed naivity. It harasses and prods you to see the more comic and capricious side of tragedy.

the ONION- female serial killer has to work twice as hard to achieve notoriety

THE STORY:

OTSEGO, MI—While she may not be making the nightly news or gracing the covers of Time and Newsweek, 46-year-old nursing-home worker Barbara Louise Huxley is a dedicated, ruthless killer. But in today's male-dominated world of remorseless slaughter, Huxley has been forced to murder twice as many innocent victims just to gain the public exposure and foster the widespread panic her male counterparts routinely enjoy.

Huxley, who smothered her first elderly patient at the ambitious age of 27, got into murder at a time when a woman slowly draining the life from a fellow human being was almost unthinkable. Seven more slow and methodical choking deaths followed, and though her heartless crimes were frequently passed over by local newspapers and her male supervisors at the nursing home, Huxley was determined to prove that she could be just as brutal and unfeeling as serial killers of the opposite sex.

Today, almost 20 years and countless cold-blooded slayings later, Huxley continues to take the lives of others in silence—simply because of her gender.

"After spending so long watching deranged men climb straight to the top of the FBI's Most Wanted list, it was hard to get up the energy to go into work every day and suffocate another frail diabetic," said Huxley, who claims her ability to take human lives without the slightest emotional response has gone overlooked by the chauvinistic news media and biased higher courts time and time again. "I started to think, 'What's the point? What am I doing here?'"

Added Huxley: "I just want to be treated like any other homicidal sociopath."

Like many young women who simply want the chance to kill as many victims as possible before being apprehended by the police, Huxley has faced fierce resistance at every turn, whether from police officials, eyewitnesses, or often, her own flailing victims.

"There's nothing more upsetting than strangling someone with surgical tubing, only to have them look at you in shock and disbelief," Huxley said. "It's like, 'Why are you so surprised? Is it because I'm a woman?!'"

According to Huxley, of the 11 murderers given serial-killer distinction in the five years before her arrest, only one was female—a woman who was eventually dismissed by a male judge as "not possessing the mental facilities required to understand the charges against her."

In addition, the few women who have been granted the distinction have received, on average, fewer than seven years of jail time for every 10 years offered to male serial killers with equivalent body counts.

Dr. Nancy Trisher, a criminal psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, attributes much of the gender divide to societal perceptions of female murderers.

"People are still uncomfortable with, and often feel threatened by, the idea of a woman slitting open a stranger's throat and watching him drown in his own blood," Trisher wrote in her most recent book, Shattering the Blood-Spattered Glass Ceiling. "Many individuals, especially men, consider women too emotional or too passive, and assume they are happier drowning their own children at home than going out to decapitate vagrants and college students."

In the meantime, Huxley and a half a dozen other women like her must continue to burn and mutilate their victims without the media and law-enforcement attention their gruesome acts rightfully deserve.

"Even when the news finally gets around to reporting on us, it's only to talk about how 'rare' it is to see women do the awful things we do," Huxley said. "It's never because we're just good murderers."

As she patiently waits for the long-delayed public outcry over her unspeakable crimes, Huxley can only hope she will soon secure the kind of lasting infamy already enjoyed by such men as Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, and Dennis Rader. An inspiration to every young girl with no regard for life, Huxley dreams of a day when society looks at her and sees not just a woman, but a bloodthirsty monster.

I decided to write about this topic based on two facts. I thought the story was very funny as well as revealing and it is based in Ostego. I thought this story as funny because it is written with such sarcasm that one can't help but laugh as one reads through. The quote from Huxley about wanting to be treated "like any other homicidal sociopath" is humorous but strikingly odd. This womans cold hearted and callous killing is of no consequence as she has proclaimed herself a homicidal sociopath but the thing that does bother her...the lack of notoriety for female serial killers. If I could sum up dark comedy using a real life example it would without a doubt be this story. The chauvinism in the news media and in higher courts is more of a problem for Huxley than the fact that she kills the innocent; what's even more entertaining is that women do not seem to be as harshly judged when convited of murder but that also seems to be a problem for Mrs. Huxley. Go figure. The whole story just oozes ridicluous complaints and thoughts on behalf of the unfamous Huxley and makes a big statement on what some seem to value, notoriety and equality over humaneness and sympathy.

slaughter house five

Aliens.
I found Vonneguts use of the aliens to be very creative and well integrated. The use of the Traflamadorians and their planet demonstrates to me how war can not only cause elaborate delusions in people but also, and I say this in the context of Vonneguts cognition, can emancipate or alleviate the problem of time that death can cause a person to face. In war you cannot escape the consuming thought of impending death; the awareness that it could come in any form and at any time existing concurrently with destruction, pain, and malevolence all caused by humanity would cause, to say the least, agonizing insight. In chapter two we get a sense of who Pilgrim is with the scene of him being fired upon by an unseen foe and standing still after the first shot waiting for a second to be fired upon him. Was this helpless gesture by Pilgrim along with the scene in the woods, where he first is confronted with an estrangment from time itself, caused by the dilemmas of war or is he just inhuman? Not necessarily in the sense of detached malic but rather non-human. As stated in the book he never gets mad and as seen through the second chapter he displays no "normal" human reactions to situations in war but then again it could be argued that there are no normal reactions while being in war. Even the aliens could be played into the idea of an inhuman quality about Billy Pilgrim. Either way it I found the introduction of the aliens and their planet to be a very bright and creative format to present the conlifctions of war.

The Old Man and the Lisa

The Old Man and the Lisa
Episode #: 174
Season #: 8
First Aired: Sunday April 20, 1997

I wouldn't go as far as to say this is my favorite episode but I find the whole ordeal with Mr. Burns to be ironically humorous. It demonstrates how Mr. burns cannot change who he is fundamentally regardless of what situation in life he is in. Mr. Burns, in my view, represents corporate America in all of its lying, cheating and cold hearted worth. This episode contains many topics discussed in class such as irony, satire and even paradoxicalness.

The whole episode is based upon Mr. Burns losing all of his money. It would appear that none of his "yes" men ever told him that his stocks were losing money and he has subsequently lost it all. Nobody cares about his loses or really anything about him or how he may end up, however. It isn't complicated irony but none the less it is ironic that the rich and pompus american businessman lost his fortune due to his inability to hire anyone who may disagree with him. He seemingly takes on an innocent quality once he loses his money and all posesions. Almost as if he lost his malevolance and misanthropy once parted from his power plant, posessions, and money; or rather once he was seperated from his nuclear power plant ( money-grubbing corporation). He has been so pathetically pampered, however, for so long that he cannot perfom simple tasks like chosing between "ketchup" and "catsup" in the supermarket. The satire here is displaying how the rich couldn't survive the real world at its most basic level even in the most dire of situations because, well, everyone does everything for them. Looking like a delusional product of dementia he is taken away to an elderly home, where people are usually placed in this society to be forgotten (lets be serious). The cold hearted and unforgiving billionaire mogul has become a penniless and forgotten nothing left to rot.
Meanwhile, Lisa Simpson has been campaigning for recycling and Burns turns to her for help in order to get back on top; he lacks any ill nature in appearence and seems quite innocent and sincere in wanting to reform and gain back his fortune. Lisa knows what Burns has done in the past and who he has been and doesn't trust this new look of austerity gleaming from his eyes. Being Lisa Simpson, however, she gives in and decides to help Mr. burns and the two begin to recycle whatever they can find. They eventually gain enough money to open a recycling plant that would benefit the two of them as well as have an obvious ripple effect within Springfield.

Now the paradox of Mr. Burns comes into play. While Mr. Burns has been endowed with the righteousness of recycling he is still at the very core himself or rather his evil self. He has tried to do something good by recycling but infact ended up dredging the ocean and collecting everything from whales to clams to make "slurry", which will be fed to farm animals. This is a paradox because Burns even while attempting to do something good has devastated the local hydrosphere and has conducted a monstrous project while making a serious attempt to do good and earn money ( which in itself is a paradox; earning money and doing good). In trying to recycle he was exhibiting a contradictory nature and inevitably turned out to be evil.

The story ends in Lisa turning down a check worth millions that was attained through creating "slurry" after Marge tells Lisa to do what she thinks is the right thing. This gives Homer four simultaneous heart attacks and causes yet another when he wakes up in the hospital and remembers what Lisa did. There could not have been a more perfect ending.

The Simpsons was, is, and will always be an amazing show. It has broken ground on countless social issues and has kept humor as well as entertainment at the forefront. Keep in mind nothing in life will ever stop changing and the fact that the Simpsons kept true to form for years on end is pretty damn good. New episodes are exactly that and lets not take them out of context and try to have them reach an impossible goal of being placed on the same pedastool as previous episodes. Take the Simpsons for what they are. Funny.

On a curious dream.

A Curious Dream
- Mark Twain

In reading this story I couldn't quite find much irony but I feel it is riddled with satire. I feel like I have to stretch to find irony but I do feel like I am missing points in the story that would enlighten my understanding.

The last three paragraphs hold much of the gravity of the story. The narrator wishes to publish his grim and enlightening encounter and speaks of this to a "shrouded wanderer" who in return says:

"Do not let that disturb you. The community that can stand such graveyards as those we are emigrating from can stand anything a body can say about the neglected and forsaken dead that lie in them."

The narrator then awakes with this paragraph:

At that very moment a cock crowed, and the weird procession vanished and left not a shred or a bone behind. I awoke, and found myself lying with my head out of the bed and "sagging" downward considerably--a position favorable to dreaming dreams with morals in them, maybe, but not poetry.

This is the most confusing paragraph for me. I do not understand exactly what he means with the last sentence. I gathered the shrouded wanderer was speaking of the injustice the dead often face and the lack of respect for those who have past in regards to the remains and the grounds they rest in; the last sentence, however, produced a very confusing interpretation of what the author was trying to say. While the lack of respect for the dead spoken of is obvious and easily observed I feel it may be too obvious and that I have only a partial understanding.

I really enjoyed this story by Twain. His consistent articulation of artistic acumen kept my fascination and attention. It wasn't only his phantasmal syntax that kept me involved in the story but I kept trying to answer "what is this trying to tell me" but it wasn't coming very clearly to me. This vague understanding of the moral of the story has kept me wondering.

As stated before I feel that it must be a satirical piece on how poor our veneration is for the dead. Any other ideas on the meaning or importance of the last paragraph would be appreciated and helpful. I truly like this story and want to understand it more than I do so hopefully either monotonous reading of the curious anecdote or outside explanation will help.