Show, don't tell: Igby Goes Down proves easier on the eyes than the ears. (Film).

THE GREAT GOD OF LAUGHTER, his sides forever split, is not pleased by black comedies, for the simple reason that they tend not to be very funny. The comedy of blackness is usually a kind of local anesthetic, something frozen, producing not humor but a dead-skinned tolerance for the horrible; and there is no situation so ghastly that it cannot be made worse by a bad joke.

In the opening scene of Burr Steers' debut Igby Goes Down, two well-dressed young men--one slouched, one poised--are sitting on their mother's deathbed. They are waiting for her to expire and they are getting ...