25 reasons why we still love Beetlejuice
By G.G. Andrew
Screenshot of official Beetlejuice trailer on warnerbros.com.
22. The Dark Humor
Beetlejuice is a black comedy, and it doesn’t hold back from exploring all the funny aspects of death, ghosts, the structure of the afterlife, or the way people die.
Among the weirder people sitting in the waiting room where Barbara and Adam go to seek help from their difficulties with the living is a blackened corpse who’s smoking and trembling.
“Wanna a cigarette?” he asks Adam.
“Oh, no,” Adam responds.
“Try to cut down myself,” the man replies.
There are also many jokes about suicide throughout the film, from alluding to those who kill themselves becoming civil servants in the hereafter to the difficulties in penning a properly poetic suicide note.
“I am alone,” Lydia writes on a piece of paper near the end of the film. But then she crumbles up the paper and tries again. “I am utterly alone. By the time you read this, I will be gone, having jumped—having plummeted—off the winter river bridge.”
Death is given a light touch in the film, not treated that preciously or seriously. “I hope it wasn’t one of your dreary suicide attempts,” Otho says to a friend who’s having dinner with the Deetz family. The humor becomes somehow funnier because these things are taken so seriously in real life.