Humour & Horror

As an interlude in more pressing life concerns, let me speculate...

I feel that Horror creativity (fiction, films, art, music) always depends in one way or another on humour. Horror is inevitably humorous and full of backslapping bonhomie (as with the audience in the cinema when watching tense or bloodthirsty scenes) and/or detached by means of irony or absurdity, often expressed via surrealism or existentialism or blatant avantgardism.
I'd summarise all that as 'humorror'.
des



Weirdtongue: my next free novel-in-progress: a work of 'humorror': plus my Myspace linked from http://www.weirdmonger.com

I love the mix. That is why I like Kafka, Catch 22, A Clockwork Orange, etc. TL's story "Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech" has its share as well.

"Humorror" is a compromise of sorts, but one that allows us to get through it all more tolerably...

I'd say essentially a symbiotic, synergistic relationship of humour and horror where one cannot normally exist without the other.

However, I do not want to give the impression that I believe that humour diminishes the horror: it accentuates it, makes it more desperate, more suicidal. Best to exchew the humour if you wish to survive the experience of horror.

The Grotesque feeds off humour like a parasite or, rather, a disease upon another disease.
des

Coincidentally, I just found a quote which is quite relevant to this thread. It comes from Ligotti's WE CAN HIDE FROM HORROR ONLY IN THE HEART OF HORROR: Notes and Aphorisms

Humor is not only a latent quality of horror, it is the mask of horror, just as horror is humor's secret face. Both are destructive; both have their inspiration in the corruptness of reality; and both seek a remedy in the annihilation of the animalistic values that motivate us.

Click to expand...

Not come across that quote before. Brilliant! Thanks, Yhaze!
des

The deliberation of despair:

Darkness and humour feed off each other. I often feel darker the funnier I’ve been. The universe itself is a porridge-pot of jokes smudged or smeared with blood like jam upon its lumpy top. An empty pot leaves me only with despair but such despair is no nearer darkness than anything else. Filling the pot - i.e. with a porridge of jokes and the other bric-a-brac of life - brings out the concept of true despair, a deeper despair because you can’t reach deep enough into the porridge-pot to grab it and thus test out how truly it is despair itself. An easily discovered despair which exists as, indeed, an obvious despair amid its own emptiness can be measured and contained and eventually dissipated. I shall have no truck with despair so easily dissipated. I want my despair hidden or filled by jokes and with other dreameries of life - and thus it becomes a deeper, direr and more dreadful despair ... forever. Not even death can stop the jokes. Or reach the despair.


des

The above is an excerpt from today's episode (part 25) of WEIRDTONGUE (The Glistenberry Romance) easily navigated from here:
http://www.weirdmonger.com

It seems to me that fear, horror and humor all come from the same souce. It appears to me that they are different aspects of the same emotion whose source is deeply embedding in our psyche. These explainations are somewhat simplistic, but you can see what i mean if i state them thusly: fear is the dread of some unknown terror, horror is the actuality of that terror and humor is something horrible happening to someone else.
Looking at humor, I think of the nature of most of the things that we find funny are terribl, but, if they happen to soneone other than ourselves we find them hysterical. Look at any Laurel and Hardy short film from the 1920's for example. I think of a phrase from around 1900 that has stuck with me for decades. It's rural humor, but extremely horrific. The phrase is, "I ain't had so much fun since the pig ate my brother." Since it happened to the brother it's funny. But, the poor brother was eaten alive by a pig. Also, since folks were poor back then, just because the pig ate a human, that won't stop them from slaughtering the pig in the Fall and eating it in its turn. Can't waste a good pig!
That's what I mean by the interrelationship of these concepts. We can fear something, but it's even worse when it arrives. It excedes our worst fears. The reason that phrase is a cliche is that it is so true. Stuill, the horror may pass over us and strike at someone else. now that's funny!

"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die."
-- Mel Brooks

Thanks, Mr D and Bendk.
I think there is much mileage in this symbiosis but I fail so far to see round the bend.

I have now rewritten the passage above (Deliberation of Despair) within the actual text of Weirdtongue 25, because - having slept on it - yesterday's version appeared not to be very well written!
des