Since 1920’s “Haunted Spooks,” the genre of horror-comedy has never really, you should excuse the expression, died. Yet humor and horror seem pretty different; one’s a pie in the face, the other’s an axe in the skull. But could there be congruences between funny and fear, snickers and screams, gore and gags, slapstick and slaughter?
Both comedy and horror exploit our paradoxical feelings about helplessness; seeing someone out of control can be hilarious (a clumsy person falling) or horrifying (a clumsy person falling into a snake-pit). Using examples from Freud & Kant to Abbott & Costello, David Misch explores how horror and humor share a mordant view of our relationship to pain; an obsession with the human body and its multifarious fluids; and a subtext of death and transcendence underlying the eviscerated flesh and fart jokes.