TY - JOUR AU1 - Ellis, David AB - © Oxford University Press ESSAYS IN CRITICISM A QUARTERLY JOURNAL FOUNDED BY F. W. BATESON Vol. LI October 2001 No. 4 Black Comedy in Shakespeare DAVID ELLIS ONE OF THE PERILS of parenthood is being taken to the cinema by your teenage daughter. There must be other readers of this journal who can also remember sitting white-knuckled through scenes of massive drug abuse, murder and homosexual rape in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction while the younger members of the audience laughed merrily, or calmly unwrapped their next boiled sweet. Either the conditions of modern life have rendered the rising generation more insensible than its predecessor, or its critical sense is more acute. Effective stylisation (they say) has a distancing effect, but if several scenes of Pulp Fiction have a cartoon-like quality which tempers the violence many others are made memorable by a mastery of realistic detail. It is sometimes said that in those cases too the tempering is effected by comedy. Certainly Pulp Fiction is often a very funny film, especially at the beginning where one of the hitmen interrogates his colleague about the peculiarities of buying beer or hot-dogs in Europe, and when they both then earnestly debate what TI - Black Comedy in Shakespeare JF - Essays in Criticism DO - 10.1093/eic/51.4.385 DA - 2001-10-01 UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/pub-caret-black-comedy-in-shakespeare-aZq02jUyL1 SP - 385 EP - 403 VL - 51 IS - 4 DP - DeepDyve ER -