I’m sure somewhere in the annals of this blog series I’ve suggested that laughter and humor infiltrate almost every facet of our lives. They appear in our exchanges at home with family, at school with classmates, at work with coworkers, and with casual acquaintances and strangers as well. We find both closely associated with comedy, of course (for example, in plays, film, television, and standup routines), but also with musical performances such as those featuring the Smothers Brothers or Victor Borge. We see laughter expressed during sporting events when players are wildly inept or wildly amazing. And, of course, humor has long been used in works of literature, be they written by Shakespeare or Mark Twain. However, one genre most people tend not to associate with laughter and humor is that of horror. They, as we shall see, are quite mistaken.
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Regular readers of this blog series are aware of its mission: To explain why we laugh and how we solicit laughter using humor, in every conceivable context. To achieve this goal, I rely on an understanding of laughter provided by a relatively new theory—The Mutual Vulnerability Theory of Laughter, or MVT. It is one I have promoted as being the first comprehensive theory of laughter and, by definition, one able to explain its use in every situation. My first post contains a more detailed description of its foundational tenets, and I shall provide one of my journal articles in the references, but here are the nuts and bolts.
The Mutual Vulnerability Theory of Laughter
According to the MVT, laughter is not simply a spasm of the diaphragm with associated vocal reverberations. It is a form of communication, a vocalization with deep evolutionary roots, just as are screams, moans, and crying. In other words, our laughter is best understood as a vocal affirmation of mutual vulnerability. If its message were to be translated into English, it would convey something along the lines of, “I’d like to remind you that we both have shortcomings, limitations, and misfortune.” Except in situations when it might be considered inappropriate and therefore repressed, it is used when vulnerabilities are highlighted in some way, and the one laughing wants to reaffirm the prior status relationship—status being a measure of vulnerability.
When our friend drops her ice cream cone, we can use laughter to say, “Don’t feel bad, I can be clumsy too,” lifting her status back to where it was before. When someone we feel disdain for displays some flaw, we might express laughter as a means of communicating, “You think you’re hot stuff, but you have the same weaknesses I do,” to lower them back to a status position we think is more appropriate. We can use laughter as it relates to our own change in status as well, using self-lifting laughter after we’ve done something stupid, trying to raise ourselves back to the previous state, and self-lowering laughter after experiencing good fortune or undeserved praise that might suggest our status is higher than it really is.
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And, thus, the link that ties laughter and humor together with horror is exactly what ties it to every other instance in which laughter is used: A sense of, the recognition of, the highlighting of…vulnerability. What distinguishes horror from other genres is that the application of a technique or strategy commonly referred to as distancing is dialed up to the max. So, what does this mean?
Distancing
Once again, it would be best if you check out my post on distancing, which can be found here. But in a nutshell, because “serious” and “extreme” vulnerabilities can be rightly thought of as “deficiencies” (that is, traits we tend not to find amusing), we use some form of distancing to mitigate their adverse effects on laughter’s expression. If someone were to tell me about a tragic accident with the intent of stimulating laughter, it better not involve my family, friends, or colleagues. I’m too close to them. I’m too personally affected by their pain and suffering. Instead, the story must involve someone distant—someone I don’t know well (or at all), someone I don’t care deeply about on a personal level. That’s emotional distancing. Another kind of distancing results from knowledge. An anecdote about a serious accident involving a loved one months or years after the fact, after I’ve come to know that he recovered fully with very little impact on his achieving his life goals, can potentially be amusing.
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Distancing factors into our laugh responses all the time, but rarely to the extent we observe in the creation and enjoyment of comedic horror. As audience members, we are drawn into the movie by identifying with one or more characters. We vicariously experience the fear and disgust they do, but we also know three important facts: (1) the actors are not really in danger—they are simulating vulnerability; (2) although invested in the story emotionally, we are at the same time sitting in a theatre and not personally at risk; and (3) when we forget 1 and 2 and become startled or frightened anyway, remembering them is cause for our own embarrassed, self-lifting laughter.
Consider this. If we were to perform a word association test with “horror” as the subject, some likely responses would be scary, dangerous, stupid, bloody, attack, chase, gore, biting, guts, darkness, weapons, injury, death, running, pain, crush, strangle, slice, screams, crying, fear, shock, saw, knife, axe, alone, abandoned, distrust, disappearance, monsters, predators, and credit card bill.
That last one might just be me but, regardless, all are linked to feelings of vulnerability. The mix of emotions that connect terror and distress to feelings of amusement are exploited by comedy-horror films such as Young Frankenstein, Shaun of the Dead, Tucker and Dale vs Evil, and Little Shop of Horrors. They literally cash in on this weird and wild juxtaposition of vulnerability and humor. I’ll place some additional links in the reference section for those who wish to learn more about this fascinating relationship.
© John Charles Simon
