This Horrific Life: Laughing in the Dark
The Marriage of Comedy and Horror
Genre is an artificial construct, a shorthand that we use to categorize things, but it is seldom a tidy affair. Since the age of the pulps in the 1920s, genre conventions have cross-pollinated to create unusual hybrids. Since the broadest definition of horror is a story intended to invoke a negative reaction from its audience, the horror genre has proved to be the most adaptive.
There’s been horror/westerns (Jonah Hex: Two Gun Mojo), horror/scifi (Alien) and hard boiled horror (Cast a Deadly Spell). The fact is, you can be scared in any environment. Which makes it all the stranger that horror blends so well with comedy.
Having worked in a newsroom for many years, I can tell you with certainty that there is no situation, no matter how terrible, that can not be laughed at. The grim humor of the very best headline in history, the New York Post’s “Headless Body in Topless Bar” gives some hint of that. If that was fit to print, what were the jokes that weren’t?
This is black comedy, the gallows humor of crime scenes and funerals, the jokes made in the face of hopelessness and despair as a sign of defiance and resolve.
Black humor has been with us, in literature, as far back Shakespeare, who wrote in “Romeo and Juliet” of Mercutio’s reaction to his stab wound, “‘tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door; but ‘tis enough, ‘twill serve: ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man.” A century later, Jonathan Swift used a similar tone in “A Modest Proposal,” a satirical essay in which he argued that the solution to the Irish famine was to eat Irish babies. Slashers and cannibalism - sounds like horror to me.
Comedy in horror matches the many variations of horror itself. Abbott and Costello were the perfect comic foils for the era of Univeral monsters in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. The gross-out humor of Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive and Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, all goo and organs and buckets of blood, brought humor to the splatterpunks.
Zombies get the treatment in Return of the Living Dead, a nonsensical 80s romp of a movie. Shaun of the Dead, meanwhile, crosses a romantic comedy with a zombie movie. Camp gets a go in the anthology movie Creepshow and its sequel, where the silliness underscore the grim climaxes of each short story. Did the funny farmer just shoot himself in the head rather than continue his existence as a mutant plant? Perhaps I shouldn’t have been laughing all that time…
Then there’s the cornball moralizing of Tales from the Crypt, which delights in lurid situations and ironic endings. Got a womanizing protagonist? Set him up with a demonic vagina and make sure the Cryptkeeper’s final line is about how he “had it coming.” Yuck yuck yuck.
While these examples are mainly horror/comedies, there are comedy/horrors too, like Young Frankenstein and Haunted Honeymoon. A recent conversation on Twitter has led me to believe an entire generation of children was left scarred by the transformation of the librarian ghost in the beginning of Ghostbusters.
Last night, as I lay in bed miserably attempting to cough the bronchitis out of my lungs, I listened to the first three episodes of the podcast Welcome to Night Vale. My friend Gus recommended I “maybe fall asleep to an episode. It will give you Lovecraft dreams.”
The podcast is done in the style of a community broadcast,chronicling the local news, weather and events of the small Southwestern desert community of Night Vale. Except, unlike most small towns, Night Vale is beset by so many supernatural phenomenon that weird lights in the sky and gatherings of hooded cultists are common place. Cecil Baldwin narrates these strange events with a straightforward, even slightly bored delivery, which in turn heightens the overall sense of absurdity. It is like Lake Wobegon’s Garrison Keillor broadcasting from H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham, Massachusettes.
In Episode Four, “PTA Meeting,” Baldwin opens with the top news story:
Last night’s Night Vale PTA meeting ended in bloodshed as a rift in space-time split open in the Main Street Recreation Center Auditorium, setting loose several confused and physically aggressive pteranodons. The glowing portal remained open and shrieked incessantly, an unholy sound that witnesses say resembled noisy urchin children caught in a combine harvester, and then slowed down and amped up through some kind of open source, easy-to-use audio editing software.
Presented with a soothing voice entirely lacking in panic makes the bizarre event even more bizarre. The entire show is a hilarious send-up of horror tropes and cliches that becomes unsettling in its own right. The culmination of weirdness is just too much - eventually, it has to transition from silly to spooky.
Gus was right. Welcome to Night Vale did give me Lovecraft dreams, and I will look forward to returning to Night Vale whenever I need laughter to go along with my tentacled horror.
Welcome to Night Vale is a twice a month production of Commonplace Books and is available for free via their website.
This Horrific Life is a daily exploration of horror, covering movies new and old (and half-watched), games, comics, music and anything else even vaguely spooky. Follow the collection to make sure you don’t miss a single installment.
