It's here that The Duke of Burgundy strikes an innovative note: the film is set in a fantastical world populated only by women, all of whom are rapt attendees of drolly dull entomology lectures.
"Probably a white guy," Mr Kanojia, who is Indian-American, says drolly.
Huston then played a series of matriarchs, from the drolly dolorous Morticia in The Addams Family (1991) and its sequel, Addams Family Values (1993), to Cuban immigrant Carmela Perez in The Perez Family (1995) to a Buffalo Bills-obsessed housewife in the dark indie Buffalo '66 (1998).
Springsteen's "The Last to Die", for instance, acquires a more implacable, driving momentum to match the glimpses of apocalyptic flight snatched from a car window, and "Inside a Dream" takes a William Blake couplet as its theme, but to less elevated ends, drolly describing dreams as a world that "looks familiar, feels obscene".
The arresting title drolly indicates the almost Manichean worldview espoused by Ray Wylie Hubbard, grizzled veteran of the Texas singer-songwriter scene.
Perversely he shuns the best of his pleasantly acerbic back catalogue – songs such as "Need a Little Time", "Song for Whoever" and "Rotterdam" – and more bafflingly still he doesn't actually sing on the majority of the chosen few, preferring to drolly orchestrate proceedings instead.
By contrast, the drolly philosophical title-track describes Adam's life as free from worry or fear, but wonders where, without danger and temptation, lies his nobility?
The absurdity of Poulsen, the gloriously more-Norwegian-than-thou aesthete, is intensified by the drolly counter-intuitive casting of the excellent black actor, Danny Lee Wynter.
Performed by a terrifically engaging five-strong ensemble and a live band whose drolly deployed music ranges from doo-wop to cheesy Perry Como, Sally Cookson's spare production achieves a wittily inventive and heart-warming balance between the darker aspects of this tale of survival over cruelty and loss and the deliciously daft comedy.
"What's the idea coming so late," the crooner drolly berates a latecomer during "The Good Life" ("a song dedicated to my wonderful friend Lady Gaga"), without breaking rhythm.
As George Balanchine once drolly observed, ballet has no way of saying "this is my mother-in-law".
