“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that.”
From Beckett’s Endgame

In this seminar, we will explore a series of works that bring into focus different aspects of the horror and hilarity of modern life. We will have occasion to discuss Pier Paolo Pasolini’s reimagining of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom in his last film Salò, Marguerite Duras’ and Svetlana Alexievich’s effort to convey an image fitting to horror of the atomic age, Guy Debord’s prescient notion of a “sick planet,” Hitchcock’s use of black humor, Harpo Marx’s funny face, and Mike Kelley’s tragi-comic sensibility.