Humor and horror
Feb. 27th, 2011 09:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kodalaiHumor and Horror
At the risk of some ironic Greek-themed retribution to hubris here, I've long considered that I have a real talent in writing in two areas: humor and horror. Glimmers of it showed up in some of my earliest teenage scrawlings, and I like to think I've improved my skills over time.
Why those two areas specifically? On pondering the nature of writing and human beings (two closely related fields of study,) I think it's because humor and horror are innately related: they are two different sides of the same coin. Both of them, at their base, rely on the principle of subverted expectations.
Overanalyzing humor, of course, takes all the funny out of it. But I think it is important to have some fundamental sense of what humor is and why we, as human beings, react the way we do to it. At its most fundamental level, humor is the way that the human brain reacts to something that is wrong or out of place. We human beings, as part of our self-awareness, live in a universe that is largely created within our heads; the real world, however, is not always so obliging. Humor is a coping mechanism for absurdity, a way to deal with things that are not as we think they should be.
This is the reason why people laugh at freak shows. It is not necessarily a sadistic enjoyment of other people's misfortunes; it's the surprised reaction to seeing a person who doesn't look like we expect them to look. A bearded woman? Absurd! Women don't have beards! And so, funny.
This is easiest to see when you look at children's jokes, or more specifically, look at things that children consider funny. Jokes such as "Knock knock. Who's there? Jimmy! Jimmy who? FAAAART! *falls down laughing*" are hilarious to kids, less so to adults. Something as simple as an animal that acts like a human being, as seen in most cartoons, will trigger the dissonance and appear as funny.
For another example, when I was a kid, I spent a lot of time reading through the comic strip collections owned by my parents. My parents, being the liberal sort, owned collections of both Doonesbury and Bloom County. I adored Bloom County, but never could get into Doonesbury, despite the fact that they essentially covered the same material (all of which was well over my head at the time.) So why did I enjoy Bloom County so much, when I didn't understand a quarter of the issues it was talking about? Because it had talking animals! It was funny!
Of course, as our society and our language becomes more sophisticated, our humor does too. It can be hard to recognize this principle of "wrongness = funny" in more sophisticated humor, but it's always there. Most verbal jokes -- as well as the entire class of puns -- comes from subverting the expectation of words. You hear a word and expect it to have one meaning; but the punchline is that the word means something else instead. Hence, the humor.
Rumiko Takahashi, the author/artist of the bestselling comedy manga Ranma 1/2, once commented that she was surprised that Ranma 1/2 was so popular outside of Japan, since she would have considered the humor to be too culture-specific to translate into different languages. My first reaction when I read that was to say, "It's a guy who turns into a girl when splashed by cold water! What about that is not funny?"
And yet, as I came to understand more about Japanese culture, I began to realize that many of the more subtle visual jokes really do not translate over all that well. I wish I had a scan of one of the early panels of Ranma 1/2, which shows Ranma in his girl form sitting around the house, cross-legged, with no shirt on, speaking in a very rude and informal manner. In other words it is a triple dose of juxtaposition: a girl who is acting in ways that no japanese girl ever would, displaying behavior, attitude and language that is normally reserved for guys. Much of that is specific to Japanese culture and, indeed, will be lost on an American audience.
Nevertheless, the basic premise is easy enough to understand in any culture: it's a guy who gets transformed into a girl at socially inconvenient moments. Therefore, it's funny.
This only highlights the necessity, when writing humor, of understanding your target audience and being in touch with the mainstream culture. While I can't speak for other cultures, in Western society -- at the very least in America -- our favorite form of humor is subverted social expectations. Here's an example, which you could expect to see replicated in any comedy show on American TV:
Female character: Why are you late? We were supposed to leave for my mother's funeral an hour ago!
Male character: I'm sorry honey, I would have been ready earlier, but I was too busy looking at porn on the internet.
Here we have a common interaction: one person is angry at another because of a social transgression. The proper social response would be to apologize and offer excuses. He gets the first part right -- the apology -- but the reason he offers is so blatantly inappropriate for the situation that it's something no sane person would consider an acceptable excuse. It's also a male talking openly about sex in public to a female, which is still something of a taboo in our culture.
That's humor. Then it comes to the flip side of the coin: horror.
The line between humor and horror is often a fine one to walk. A story, setting, or news item can be horrible to one person, hilarious to another. That's because they're both essentially plying to the same facet of human cognition: the recognition that something is wrong and out of place. The main difference between them, if there is a difference at all, comes in setting and subtlety.
Horror is a tricky thing to pin down. Many creators attempt it, not all succeed. What constitutes quality or successful horror also varies widely among any given audience, because the threshhold of what's considered horrific can be a very personal thing.
But I'll propose this: Good horror, successful horror, the truly creeping and terrifying horror comes from seeing something distorted or out of place or wrong in a setting that should otherwise be familiar. Alfred Hitchcock once said that the scariest thing you can put on a silver screen is a closed door. He was right, but at the same time not complete; we see closed doors on a TV set or a movie screen all the time. What makes it scary is if the camera angle, or the music, or the reactions of the actors on screen tell us that something is wrong with the door, without us knowing what. The sense that *something* is out of place, that something *should* be frightening about this otherwise commonplace object, but we don't know what's wrong, brings the true feeling of horror.
Monsters with slavering fangs, dripping tentacles, and bloody claws are frightening. If they jump out of you, they can be startlingly terrifying. But are they really horrifying? That's the question that a lot of movie and, especially, video game developers have to work at. A monster without context is just a scary beast, after all; the element of horror is brought along with the context, knowing that this monster used to be, should be a human being but is not.
One of the most highly regarded horror writers of our era is H.P. Lovecraft, whose Cthulu mythos and other 'cosmic horror' works provide the foundation for much modern horror. And yet, when reading the original works, reactions can vary widely. Personally, while I found Lovecraft to be a great world-builder and fantastically creative in a fantasy and science fiction realms, the actual works did not always provoke a horror reaction from me simply because they were too far removed from the context of my life. It was hard to feel too sympathetic with the hideous fates that befell the protagonists when in many cases it seems like they really brought it on themselves; they went looking for those necromantic tomes, spent far too much obsessive time and resources pursuing the hideous secrets of the universe whereas if they had just stayed home, they would have been fine. True horror occurs when the terrible starts to come into your home, your community, your basement, your quaint little New England seaside town.
For instance, in one of his seminal works The Shadow Out of Time, the protagonist has his mind abducted and swapped with an Eldritch Horror from a long-dead society of triffid-like beasts from millions of years ago. Most of the story is spent describing the physical attributes and social structure of the Old Ones. Fascinating and creative, yes, but creepy and frightening? Not particularly. Another of his works, The Rats in the Walls, I considered to be much more shivery since much of the text details the slow descent of the protagonist into madness and hearing vermin in the walls of his house; when I showed it to a good friend of mine, she said she simply found it hilarious.
The trigger point between a subtle wrongness and a blatant wrongness can backfire. Something that is too abnormal and bizarre, without the proper context to shade it into subtlety, simply comes across as absurd -- and hilarious. Many shows can leverage horrific things into dark or gallows humor simply by exaggerating them so much that the 'appropriate' reactions of dismay, sympathy, fear, and disgust no longer apply, and it simply becomes funny.
In both cases, it's imperative to have a sensitive reading of your audience. Because the threshold can be different for many people, it can be difficult to present either a humorous work OR a horrific one that appeals broadly and has the desired effect for all audiences. But if you know what the audience knows, and you know what the audience expects, then the path is open to subvert those expectations into hilarity -- or horror.
At the risk of some ironic Greek-themed retribution to hubris here, I've long considered that I have a real talent in writing in two areas: humor and horror. Glimmers of it showed up in some of my earliest teenage scrawlings, and I like to think I've improved my skills over time.
Why those two areas specifically? On pondering the nature of writing and human beings (two closely related fields of study,) I think it's because humor and horror are innately related: they are two different sides of the same coin. Both of them, at their base, rely on the principle of subverted expectations.
Overanalyzing humor, of course, takes all the funny out of it. But I think it is important to have some fundamental sense of what humor is and why we, as human beings, react the way we do to it. At its most fundamental level, humor is the way that the human brain reacts to something that is wrong or out of place. We human beings, as part of our self-awareness, live in a universe that is largely created within our heads; the real world, however, is not always so obliging. Humor is a coping mechanism for absurdity, a way to deal with things that are not as we think they should be.
This is the reason why people laugh at freak shows. It is not necessarily a sadistic enjoyment of other people's misfortunes; it's the surprised reaction to seeing a person who doesn't look like we expect them to look. A bearded woman? Absurd! Women don't have beards! And so, funny.
This is easiest to see when you look at children's jokes, or more specifically, look at things that children consider funny. Jokes such as "Knock knock. Who's there? Jimmy! Jimmy who? FAAAART! *falls down laughing*" are hilarious to kids, less so to adults. Something as simple as an animal that acts like a human being, as seen in most cartoons, will trigger the dissonance and appear as funny.
For another example, when I was a kid, I spent a lot of time reading through the comic strip collections owned by my parents. My parents, being the liberal sort, owned collections of both Doonesbury and Bloom County. I adored Bloom County, but never could get into Doonesbury, despite the fact that they essentially covered the same material (all of which was well over my head at the time.) So why did I enjoy Bloom County so much, when I didn't understand a quarter of the issues it was talking about? Because it had talking animals! It was funny!
Of course, as our society and our language becomes more sophisticated, our humor does too. It can be hard to recognize this principle of "wrongness = funny" in more sophisticated humor, but it's always there. Most verbal jokes -- as well as the entire class of puns -- comes from subverting the expectation of words. You hear a word and expect it to have one meaning; but the punchline is that the word means something else instead. Hence, the humor.
Rumiko Takahashi, the author/artist of the bestselling comedy manga Ranma 1/2, once commented that she was surprised that Ranma 1/2 was so popular outside of Japan, since she would have considered the humor to be too culture-specific to translate into different languages. My first reaction when I read that was to say, "It's a guy who turns into a girl when splashed by cold water! What about that is not funny?"
And yet, as I came to understand more about Japanese culture, I began to realize that many of the more subtle visual jokes really do not translate over all that well. I wish I had a scan of one of the early panels of Ranma 1/2, which shows Ranma in his girl form sitting around the house, cross-legged, with no shirt on, speaking in a very rude and informal manner. In other words it is a triple dose of juxtaposition: a girl who is acting in ways that no japanese girl ever would, displaying behavior, attitude and language that is normally reserved for guys. Much of that is specific to Japanese culture and, indeed, will be lost on an American audience.
Nevertheless, the basic premise is easy enough to understand in any culture: it's a guy who gets transformed into a girl at socially inconvenient moments. Therefore, it's funny.
This only highlights the necessity, when writing humor, of understanding your target audience and being in touch with the mainstream culture. While I can't speak for other cultures, in Western society -- at the very least in America -- our favorite form of humor is subverted social expectations. Here's an example, which you could expect to see replicated in any comedy show on American TV:
Female character: Why are you late? We were supposed to leave for my mother's funeral an hour ago!
Male character: I'm sorry honey, I would have been ready earlier, but I was too busy looking at porn on the internet.
Here we have a common interaction: one person is angry at another because of a social transgression. The proper social response would be to apologize and offer excuses. He gets the first part right -- the apology -- but the reason he offers is so blatantly inappropriate for the situation that it's something no sane person would consider an acceptable excuse. It's also a male talking openly about sex in public to a female, which is still something of a taboo in our culture.
That's humor. Then it comes to the flip side of the coin: horror.
The line between humor and horror is often a fine one to walk. A story, setting, or news item can be horrible to one person, hilarious to another. That's because they're both essentially plying to the same facet of human cognition: the recognition that something is wrong and out of place. The main difference between them, if there is a difference at all, comes in setting and subtlety.
Horror is a tricky thing to pin down. Many creators attempt it, not all succeed. What constitutes quality or successful horror also varies widely among any given audience, because the threshhold of what's considered horrific can be a very personal thing.
But I'll propose this: Good horror, successful horror, the truly creeping and terrifying horror comes from seeing something distorted or out of place or wrong in a setting that should otherwise be familiar. Alfred Hitchcock once said that the scariest thing you can put on a silver screen is a closed door. He was right, but at the same time not complete; we see closed doors on a TV set or a movie screen all the time. What makes it scary is if the camera angle, or the music, or the reactions of the actors on screen tell us that something is wrong with the door, without us knowing what. The sense that *something* is out of place, that something *should* be frightening about this otherwise commonplace object, but we don't know what's wrong, brings the true feeling of horror.
Monsters with slavering fangs, dripping tentacles, and bloody claws are frightening. If they jump out of you, they can be startlingly terrifying. But are they really horrifying? That's the question that a lot of movie and, especially, video game developers have to work at. A monster without context is just a scary beast, after all; the element of horror is brought along with the context, knowing that this monster used to be, should be a human being but is not.
One of the most highly regarded horror writers of our era is H.P. Lovecraft, whose Cthulu mythos and other 'cosmic horror' works provide the foundation for much modern horror. And yet, when reading the original works, reactions can vary widely. Personally, while I found Lovecraft to be a great world-builder and fantastically creative in a fantasy and science fiction realms, the actual works did not always provoke a horror reaction from me simply because they were too far removed from the context of my life. It was hard to feel too sympathetic with the hideous fates that befell the protagonists when in many cases it seems like they really brought it on themselves; they went looking for those necromantic tomes, spent far too much obsessive time and resources pursuing the hideous secrets of the universe whereas if they had just stayed home, they would have been fine. True horror occurs when the terrible starts to come into your home, your community, your basement, your quaint little New England seaside town.
For instance, in one of his seminal works The Shadow Out of Time, the protagonist has his mind abducted and swapped with an Eldritch Horror from a long-dead society of triffid-like beasts from millions of years ago. Most of the story is spent describing the physical attributes and social structure of the Old Ones. Fascinating and creative, yes, but creepy and frightening? Not particularly. Another of his works, The Rats in the Walls, I considered to be much more shivery since much of the text details the slow descent of the protagonist into madness and hearing vermin in the walls of his house; when I showed it to a good friend of mine, she said she simply found it hilarious.
The trigger point between a subtle wrongness and a blatant wrongness can backfire. Something that is too abnormal and bizarre, without the proper context to shade it into subtlety, simply comes across as absurd -- and hilarious. Many shows can leverage horrific things into dark or gallows humor simply by exaggerating them so much that the 'appropriate' reactions of dismay, sympathy, fear, and disgust no longer apply, and it simply becomes funny.
In both cases, it's imperative to have a sensitive reading of your audience. Because the threshold can be different for many people, it can be difficult to present either a humorous work OR a horrific one that appeals broadly and has the desired effect for all audiences. But if you know what the audience knows, and you know what the audience expects, then the path is open to subvert those expectations into hilarity -- or horror.
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no subject
Date: 2011-02-28 04:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-28 04:53 am (UTC)Humor also requires the sense of a moral code violated; but the violators are shrunk and trivialized, so that we do not empathize with them, but laugh at them.
Anyway, you have obviously thought very deeply on this; and there is much to think on.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-01 03:37 am (UTC)Satire is an example of humor that's applied to a greater purpose. Like sarcasm, satire derives its humor from the fact that the literal meaning and the intention of what's being said don't match, so there is a dissonance created by that mismatch. But although humor is included to make it enjoyable to the audience, that's not the point; the purpose of the satire is to critically attack or draw attention to a subject. Same goes for The Daily Show.
On a less organized and conscious level, humor is also used as a vehicle to reinforce psychological expectations and reinforce social ideas at the same time that the theme of 'subverted expectations' exists to jar the brain into the humor response. For example: racist jokes. I don't have any on hand and I don't feel like looking them up, so I'll use its tame cousin, the blond joke:
The humor of the joke is that the blond guy made a mistake. If the salesman turned on the saw and was like 'Oh, you're right, it's a dud, I'll get you a replacement,' then the joke would no longer be funny. But the enjoyment of the joke is a satisfying glow of reinforced stereotypes: blondes are dumb, blacks are lazy, mexicans are thieves, whatever. A joke like that can subvert expectations and reinforce them at the same time, and is often used in a social context to do so.
How this ties into the point you were making, about the Masque of the Red Death, is that humor (and horror) can also be used to make points about social justice. Indeed, they often do, because we want to be reinforced in our basic expectation that good things happen to good people, or, failing that, at least that bad things happen to bad people. Since both humorous tales and horrific ones often revolve around something bad (or at least humiliating) happening, then we want to be reassured that the target of the misfortune has earned it in some way.
The masque of the red death is a good example, and here's another more recent one: I've never seen the movie Friday the 13th and I'm sure you haven't either, but it was a keystone of modern horror filmography. The basic plot is that a group of camp counselors who committed a sin -- letting a kid drown when they were supposed to be watching him -- and the 'ghost' of Jason comes back and avenges his death by killing them off. It would be too unpleasant to watch a movie about a group of complete innocents being murdered, so they have to have sinned in some way. This led to a very common trope in horror movies where if there are two female characters, then one of them will be sexually active and the other will not, and guess which one is going to survive till the end?
The conclusion I'm driving at is that I don't think the basic humor reflex is intrinsically tied to moral codes, either upheld or violated; but it's very commonly paired with them, because we use humor to cope with a lot of bad things that happen to us in this world, and it's much more comfortable for us to associate bad events with moral failings in some way.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-01 11:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-02 11:48 pm (UTC)I was just describing Ranma 1/2 to someone and so I find it a little creepy that you were thinking of it too ;-) But I think the root of the humor in the show comes from the awkward situations that are created by the switching. A lot of what you were talking about but also very specific in terms of setting and scene. I admit that a lot of it went over my head, moreso than with other animes, probably because of the genre. You don't need a lot of cultural back story to understand an adventure like FMA or Escaflowne.
I feel that humor can also derive from something that the audience appreciates, especially when it comes to parody or satire. My friend Douglas and I recently wrote Green Eggs and Hamlet. We've been performing it for almost a year now and I'm still surprised at what certain audiences laugh at. Certainly they can all find something to relate to, but recently I was struck with the idea that they were enjoying our expertise of the subject matter. An audience member came to me and even told me so. That they found it enjoyable and funny because we used Dr. Seuss to so concisely describe a Shakesperean plot. Bored of the Rings is mostly funny to me because it parallels LotR so well.
Anyway, to horror: I actually really don't like horror but I found this discussion very interesting. I first thought of the Evil Dead series. Mostly because it describes this very thing. The filmmakers wanted to make a horror film and instead it became a comedy. Was it all setting/scene? Was it all because of the poorly made monsters? I think it is closer to what you are describing in that humor and horror are the same impulses just maybe in different directions.
Modern films have either perfected or bastardized the horror genre. They can make monsters so realistic that they are no longer impressive. I think more cerebral horror films like Hitchcock would do very well today because of the stark difference with today's films. Personally, the most horrifying thing I can watch is human evil. The new War of the Worlds was terrifying to me because of all the mob scenes where everyday men and women became crass, vile creatures willing to destroy anyone and anything in their path. That is much scarier than any monster under the stairs.
I would also argue that there are horror films in which the characters are not destroyed because they deserve it but because of random happenstance. They are fewer than the righteous ones, but I think they do exist. (I think Saw falls into this category but I've honestly never seen it) Certainly the righteous horror also fulfills the audience's cathartic need for justice. (Scream, I know what you did last summer, the Ring, etc)
I really like that you posted this. Thank you!
no subject
Date: 2011-03-04 03:26 am (UTC)I don't know that I'm in a position of authority to say bastardized, but I do think a lot of people who try to do horror fundamentally misunderstand what they're trying to do. Getting photo-realistic monsters in film is like going for photo-realistic drawings in art... it's not really the point. It's more important to evoke the right atmosphere and get the right emotions from your audience.
I think that what you're talking about, seeing other people display clever skill and competence, is one of the things you can do to add a great amount of enjoyment to something - margi refers to it as "competency porn" and it is the primary draw of shows like Leverage. Basically, people just like watching other people do things extremely well, as much if not more than they derive humor or satisfaction out of watching people fuck up, as most modern sitcoms use as their basis. >.>