This fall at Scandinavia House, experience Nordic comedy at its darkest with “Svart Humor”! “If there’s a dead body in Denmark, someone is going to make a joke about it,” director Anders Jensen once said; Nordic comedies are as known for their deadpan, dry wit as for their occasionally noir subject matter, celebrating the “svart/sort” (dark) side of life’s hilarities.

The series kicks off on September 13 with Sick of Myself /Syk Pike (dir. Kristoffer Borgli, Norway/Denmark/Sweden/France, 2022), a biting Norwegian satire hailed as “a 95-minute-long insanity spiral and nihilist’s delight” (Cinemacy)! Self-involved young Oslo residents Signe (Kristine Kujath) and Thomas (Eirik Sæther) are a perfectly toxic match; both are equally insufferable and desperate to be noticed.

But when Thomas’s burgeoning artistic success tips the power balance too far in his favor, rising to fame with his sculptures made of stolen furniture, Signe becomes hell-bent on attracting attention and sympathy, beginning with faking a nut allergy. As she seeks out more drastic ways to reclaim attention within the milieu of Oslo’s culture elite, the results become increasingly grotesque.

A pitch-black “unromantic comedy” shot through with elements of Cronenbergian horror that was one of the highlights of Cannes 2022 (and one of John Waters’ “Best Films of 2022” and NY Magazine’s “Best Movies of 2023” ), Sick of Myself is a delightfully unsparing dissection of our warped, celebrity-obsessed times.

“A cross between the malicious wit of Ruben Östlund’s recent pictures and the lurid excesses of John Waters’ early film Female Trouble… Comedies don’t get much darker than this”—The Guardian

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