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Director David Cromer, whose sensibility gravitates between stark and dark, endows the staging with macabre elegance.

The subjects of grief and biotechnology in the macabre Canadian’s latest offering, “The Shrouds,” are also known to call up a host of conflicting feelings.

Far from it: Nadel, a museum curator and comics expert, expresses palpable admiration for Crumb, and sympathy for a peripatetic upbringing that could quietly be as macabre as anything he drew.

Ricky Gervais, one of the modern masters of roasting celebrities and riffing on the macabre, has a new show called “Mortality.”

Curtis’ revelation is gutwrenching not just because it’s innately macabre, but because it asks the viewer to imagine a world where they could face a similar predicament.