Funny / Edgar Allan Poe

• "A Predicament" is a parody of a particular kind of Gothic sensation story: the narrator, Signora Psyche Zenobia, is exploring a cathedral when she sticks her head through an opening and realises that she's looking out of a clock face. She then realises that the minute hand has trapped her neck, and that it's cutting through it. Despite this, all she feels is the inconvenience of having her head cut off, which duly happens, without her feeling anything except that she's glad to be rid of it. She continues to narrate the story, minus her head.
• The actor, writer and director Steven Berkoff made a performance piece out of "The Tell Tale Heart" which inserted a great piece of comic business into the general paranoia of it all. He did it with no set whatever, but conveyed the whole surroundings using only mime:
  Berkoff: First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs. I then took up three planks from the flooring of the chamber, and deposited all between the scantlings.
  [Berkoff pauses, thinks, says the word to himself a few times, puzzled, then signals to the audience "Wait a sec" and steps backwards. He runs his finger through the air as if consulting the books on a shelf, finds a "book", takes it down and mimes flipping through the pages and running his finger down them as if searching, then slows down, finds the word, reads it, does an "Oh, that's what it means" expression, then closes the book, puts it back on the "shelf", comes forward, and resumes exactly as he left off]
  Berkoff: ...Between the scantlings. I then replace the boards so cunningly...
• In "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade" the Sultan listens to the tale full of nineteen-centuryt discoveries described in outlandish-sounding ways, but mainly limits himself to one word disbelieving responses. What's the Sultan's breaking point? When Scheherazade starts talking about a fatality "in the shape of a crotchet" (i.e. the bustle) and claims "the days have long gone by since it was possible to distinguish a woman from a dromedary".