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Horrific Humor and the Moment of Droll Grimness in Cinema: Sidesplitting sLaughter

2020; Penn State University Press; Volume: 6; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/studamerhumor.6.1.0194

2333-9934

David Gillota,

Crime, Deviance, and Social Control

Horror and comedy, as broad film genres, have a lot in common. By generating laughter and/or terror, both genres provoke involuntary and often physical reactions from audiences. Both are often viewed by critics as lowbrow and dispensable cultural products, and both often revel in abject bodies or seek ways to supposedly gross out audience members through depictions of blood or excrement. Considering these overlaps, it is no surprise that many horror movies are quite funny, and many comic films can be horrifying. Horrific Humor and the Moment of Droll Grimness in Cinema is thus a welcome addition to the small body of critical literature exploring the overlaps between horror and humor.This essay collection marks coeditor Cynthia J. Miller's second foray into the humor/horror hybrid. Her earlier collection, The Laughing Dead: The Horror-Comedy Film from Bride of Frankenstein to Zombieland (coedited with A. Bowdoin Van Riper in 2015), is firmly rooted in analysis of the overlap between horror and comedy films, and the essays therein discuss a broad swath of classics from this mixed genre. The current collection also features considerations of important horror comedies (Tucker and Dale vs. Evil [2010], Parents [1989], Dead Snow [2009]), but its overall selection is much more eclectic, including a few films that most would not consider horror or comedy, such as Django Unchained (2012), The Dark Knight (2008), Fight Club (1999), and—perhaps most surprisingly— various cinematic representations of the Titanic disaster. On the one hand, this eclecticism is a strength of the collection, and readers can find unexpected analysis of comically horrific (or horrifically comic) moments in otherwise so-called straight movies. On the other hand, those readers who would be drawn to a collection like this might not be as interested in discussions of films that are, strictly speaking, neither horror nor comedy. Those readers would be better served looking instead at Miller's first coedited collection.The introduction, primarily written by John A. Dowell, provides an overview of not only the book's structure but also its key theoretical term: “sLaughter.” Dowell explains that the word “is a neologism describing a moment, perhaps only lasting a few seconds, in which a human being experiences an event as simultaneously horrifying and funny.” Dowell goes on to explain that sLaughter “is not perceived as one and then the other, though the occurrence may be at a rate of dyssynchronous fibrillation so fast the two cannot easily be distinguished” (xviii). In a manner that feels somewhat forced—as though it was an editorial mandate to the authors—every essay in the collection goes on to use this neologism at least once although not always in precisely the same way that Dowell defines it. The term is a little too cute for my taste, but more importantly, the editors and authors could do more to explain its necessity and to differentiate it from other descriptors (like dark comedy, black humor, or cringe comedy) that critics have been using for decades.The body of the book is divided into three sections. The first section, “The Aesthetics and Mechanics of sLaughter,” features four essays that explore the formal aspects of horrific humor. Iain J. W. Ellis offers a consideration of the punk aesthetic in low-budget horror comedies like The Toxic Avenger (1984) and Tromeo and Juliet (1996) produced by Troma Studios. Don Tresca looks at postmodern genre play in two important twenty-first-century horror comedies, The Cabin in the Woods (2011) and Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. Moritz Fink uses Bakhtin's work on the carnivalesque to consider the evil clown—such as Stephen King's Pennywise or Batman's nemesis, the Joker—as both a “trope of horror and a satiric device” (30). The section is rounded out by Colin Yeo's essay, which considers the ways in which repetition destabilizes “notions of horror and humor” (45) in the bloody consumer satire films Fight Club and American Psycho (2000).The second section, “Bodies in the sLaughterhouse,” is ostensibly about horror, humor, and the body. The essays therein, however, prove to be quite disparate. William Quiterio gives a nice analysis of childhood trauma in Bob Balaban's creepy and funny satire Parents (about a child who slowly learns that his mother and father are cannibals). David Misch provides brief examples from many different films but mostly offers a theoretical consideration of the potential of the instability of our bodies to both horrify us and make us laugh. Likewise, Ben Urish's contribution relating sLaughter to existentialism is primarily theoretical, so much so that it probably would have worked better if it had been placed in the first section of the book. The section also includes an interesting—albeit out of place—essay by Thomas Britt, in which he considers Fargo (1996), Django Unchained, and the Israeli thriller Big Bad Wolves (2013) within the contexts of national cinema, genre history, and folklore.The final section of Horrific Humor, “Beyond Mere War,” has just three essays, two of which focus on cinematic representations of Nazis. Ben Betka provides a broad survey of what he calls the Cinenazi and identifies two strands: “One is more tangible and is put on the screen as a result of its roots in the world outside the movie theater. The other seems to have abandoned these roots while working exclusively for sudden shivering moments of sLaughter” (116). With respect to the second strand, Betka offers brief considerations of the cult comedy Surf Nazis Must Die (1987) and Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009), among others. Miller's own contribution is a nice complement to this essay, as she focuses primarily on one film, the Norwegian zombie-Nazi comedy Dead Snow. Miller provides excellent close readings of the film itself and also situates it within a larger context of other Nazi zombie films, of which there are many more than most would expect. It's a shame, though, that Miller didn't have space to also discuss Dead Snow's even funnier sequel, Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead (2014). The section, and the book itself, concludes with Ann Larabee's discussion of humor in Titanic films, ranging from silent-era movies to James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster. Larabee explains that “there are two basic types of humor in Titanic movies: a gallows humor in the passengers' dialogue as they resign themselves to their own horrible fates, and an oblivious humor that is unable to recognize the horror beneath the surface flow of events” (145). It's an original essay, and it highlights the manner in which humor scholars could look beyond comic films to consider wit in unexpected places.The majority of the essays in Horrific Humor clock in at fewer than fifteen pages, including notes and bibliography. This brevity results in arguments that are suggestive and provocative but do not go in depth, especially given that so many of these essays focus on two or more films. The brevity and accessibility of the essays, however, could make them ideal supplemental readings for students. Overall, the book is a useful resource for scholars interested in the horror/humor overlap, and there is something in it for any film scholar interested in either cinematic horror or comedy. Because there are so many different types of films covered, though, most will likely read the essays piecemeal rather than reading the entire book from cover to cover.