Arsenic & Old Lace is a wonderful dark comedy full of ironies. First of all, define: irony. Secondly, list and briefly discuss as many examples if irony that you can find and/or remember in the movie.
1. The definition of irony is the incongruity or the inconsistency between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result. (dictionary.com)
2. At the beginning of the movie we learn that Mortimer Brewster is getting ready to marry Elaine Harper, Although he is the author and newspaper writer who disagrees with the idea of marriage. So its a little ironic that someone who was so against marriage in the beginning is married himself. Then we found out that his sweet caring aunts are actually killing lonely old men. Everyone believes them to be almost saintly but turns out they are murders, sweet ones at that. Then in the end Mortimer realizes what he thought about his family before was not true. He realizes that he comes from a family of crazy people.
Actually, he first thinks his aunts are sane, then finds out they aren't and that crazy runs in his family and he is doomed to be crazy as well, but at the end he finds out he is not related by blood to any of them.
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