Fast and funny, "Death by Leisure" has the high spirits of a chick book, because its author is interested in chick-lit things: dates, celebrities, vanity and shopping.
After an intermission Mr. Roth came onstage, dressed in a black suit and black shirt, and read from one of the several graveyard scenes in "Sabbath's Theater," a passage that was typically Rothian: dark and funny, death haunted and full of vigor.
I'll give her a big hug and say, 'I thought you were really going to die, Vicky,' and she'll laugh and pull a funny death face, eyes bulging, tongue lolling, and spin some yarn about an out-of-body experience.
Thursday brings The Ballad of Cable Hogue (Channel 13 at 8 p.m ., a wry, warm and funny death-of-the-Old West fable that is one of the late Sam Peckinpah's finest films.
If there's a funnier death in cinema, I don't care to hear about it.
Coppola's reticence makes it easy to see why playing Al Pacino's doomed daughter in The Godfather III - a haplessly gawky performance capped by what may be, unwittingly, one of the funniest death scenes in the history of melodrama - was such agony for her.
Largely overlooked at the time of its first release, "Night of the Creeps" has become a bootleg cult favorite in recent years, perhaps because its succession of funny, grisly deaths strongly resembles current horror comedies like "Shaun of the Dead" and "Zombieland".
And I know there's nothing funny about death — at least, that's the current thinking from this side.
Cristi Puiu's honest, stoical, grimly funny The Death of Mr Lazarescu, about the ghastly legacy of the Ceausescu regime, won a major award at Cannes two years ago and announced that something important was happening there.
"It's funny how death — better than any poll or Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ballot — can make you feel, instinctively, the value of an artist.
