The lighter side of depravity, death and despair

"I like darkness and confusion and absurdity
but I like to know that there could be a little door that you could go out
into [an] area of happiness." -David Lynch





THE HUMOR IN TWIN PEAKS

Complimenting a tasty visual feast like a fine sparkling wine, Twin Peaks humor served up a buoyant yin to the series' predominantly darker yang. Embedded, perhaps, as a buffer to curb alienation in the faint-hearted, it became a fixture and a segue of sorts, gently drawing viewers from the wickedly aberrant into the blatantly bizarre. The lighter segments offer viewers a different but equally captivating hold on those seeking answers to Twin Peaks' darker mysteries, and remain a singular source of fancy and fondness for fans of the series. Acknowledging its part in securing Twin Peaks' place as a groundbreaking and enduring cultural phenomenon, this excerpt from a presentation made to the University of Waterloo in 1996 subtitled Taking Television Seriously, gives Peaksian humor its due: "It would be very difficult to talk about entertainment and television without mentioning what was probably one of television's most unusual shows. The critics called Twin Peaks surrealist comedy, postmodernist humour, and the rusted-in mythology of the American dream. Basically, Twin Peaks was a soap opera about a fictional Pacific Northwest town where the murder of Laura Palmer served as the catalyst to draw out some dark secrets. Yet there must be something more there. Daytime and evening soaps are full of such dark secrets. Something turned Twin Peaks into a phenomenon which - at its height - saw people all around North America gathering at Thursday night parties to watch the show and quote lines from the program while sharing coffee, donuts, and cherry pie. When the main mystery - Who killed Laura Palmer? - was solved, the show lost nothing of its charm for even more strange happenings began. In any other show what would have been the ending was really just the beginning." Terrence Rafferty, film critic for The New Yorker, wrote: "He (Lynch) introduces a slew of characters, establishes their tangled relationships, shows us the terrain, scatters clues to the murder, revs up a fleet of subplots, hints at an appropriate number of dark secrets and obscure motivations, throws in plenty of goofy jokes - and does it all seamlessly. He varies the tone, sometimes radically, but he never breaks the odd, hushed mood, which is as overpowering and immutable as the neutral sky. Although terrible things happen, or seem about to, in Twin Peaks, it has the air of an enchanted place, a fairy-tale wonderland. As ominous as it is, we don't really want to run away from it - we want to remain enveloped in this dreadful forest, to learn how to see in the complex darkness".

Copyrighted material and images on this site are intended as an archival homage only. Appreciative thanks to the original copyright holders for their continued indulgence and impunity.

This site launched online Oct 1, 1997 Graphics by � Ice's Web World, Jeri Callan � Athena's Borders and � AnnSThesia Web Graphics