Can't you see in Ida's dance there is croatian flag, croatian coat of arms and even picture of zagreb cathedral in the wall?
Why do you americans allways where is something slavic thinks it's from Russia or soviet union?
Wow, that's quite a find! Are you Croatian by any chance? I believe you are right about Zagreb Cathedral, and indeed it looks most like the Croatian coat of arms (although the chequered pattern looks like yellow-and-red squares to me rather than white (silver)-and-red, but that's not really an issue). I don't see a flag, by the way. Can be my bad eyesight :s
(*) The men seem to wear Croatian national dress too: black trilby hats, white lace shirts and pants, black waistcoat and black shoes.
(*) The YouTube video link cited below actually points out the folded flag. So now I know'.
I'm actually really surprised, because 'ethnic comedy' is mostly deliberately kept vague, in other words, politically correct, so as not to offend specific races or nations. Especially when this nation has such cruel, even barbaric customs as Ida's homeland! There's a pattern of that in more recent American comedy, from the toning down of the Mexican stereotype in "Chico and the Man", to the vague ethnicity of Andy Kaufman's character (Latka Gravas) in "Taxi', and the Greek-or-so background of Balki Bartokomous in "Perfect Strangers". That's why I never bothered to look up the ethnic names and customs Ida uses - I assumed they were all deliberately made up.
By the way, I quite like black humour, because it sets MITM apart from all those moralistic feel-good family comedies that we so often get to see. I hadn't noticed the blood dripping out of Dewey's ears yet - I agree that this is borderline permissible. The tone is much like the Simpsons, which still feels funny, and not like the extreme nastiness of South Park for instance. The trouble is, I think, that a little bit of real-life cruelty automatically becomes more graphic and hits home more than ten times the amount in cartoons, where the level of sadism is nearly always laughed off.
Rich