Dead Funny: The Humor of American Horror

Focusing primarily, though not exclusively, on North American horror films from the 1930s to the 2020s, David Gillota's Dead Funny: The Humor of American Horror seeks to explain how humor operates in relation to horror and argues that "horror's humor often functions in tandem with horror elements and contributes to a work's tone, themes, and structure" (2–3).Gillota finds "humor to be a prominent part of horror in most major periods" and observes that "many of the genre's most canonical works and every recognizable subgenre" contain examples (2). The book features an introduction followed by six thematic chapters that view North American horror through the lens of specific humorous modes/devices, including parody, comic monsters, body humor, camp, awkward humor, and satire. (Notably, the book does not engage with the relevant ideas of dark comedy, black humor, absurdism, sLaughter, or the carnivalesque.) There is, not surprisingly, quite a bit of overlap in these devices and in the films that use them, resulting in some repetition across the chapters. And the fact that the devices used by horror and humor "tend to rely on elements of surprise, incongruity," and tension (7) blurs the focus on humor, though the inclusion of nonhorror texts like The Office and Rick and Morty as explanatory examples may be useful to horror scholars less familiar with humorous modes.The first chapter considers both parody of horror and self-reflective parody in horror. Gillota's analysis of Young Frankenstein (1974), Last House on the Left (1972), Piranha (1978), and Scary Movie (2000) demonstrate how horror has been parodied to both amuse and frighten and how it offers disturbing social criticism through its parodies of other genres, such as television sit-coms. Parody is a fitting place for the book to begin, as many readers are no doubt familiar with the comedy-horror combination from such films as Scary Movie, and Gillota does an excellent job at expanding on this familiarity. Nonetheless, attending to existing work on sharksploitation films that riff Jaws (1975) might have made Gillota's reading of Piranha more nuanced, and his general argument about parody's rejection of stability and safety might have been stronger if he had considered the workings of postmodern horror.Chapter 2 identifies "three types of comic monsters," clowns, fools, and dummies, and relates them to "humor theories that focus on repression" and "boundary construction" (9). Gillota makes a notable contribution to analyses of the evil clown figure by expanding its definition to include "any monsters that display a performative comic sensibility" (9), embracing such horror icons as Freddy Krueger, the Phantom of the Opera, and the Invisible Man. Gillota argues that the laughter of monstrous clowns "signifies disdain for conventional norms" and that monstrous fools are social pariahs who are laughed at (58), for example, the eponymous protagonist of Carrie (1976). Such fools are more clearly related to monstrosity than to comedy owing to their connections to scapegoats and grotesque feminine figures. Evil dolls, the fear of which Gillota explains through Freud's concept of the uncanny, are part of the diabolical dummies category. Gillota points to prominent examples of the dummy as monster in television series such as The Twilight Zone (1962) and explores other well-known dolls like Chucky (Child's Play) in other parts of the book but only mentions Annabelle (The Conjuring and Annabelle) in passing. The chapter's key insight is that an "acknowledgment of horror's comic monsters does not change our basic understanding of the monster's various roles, but it does add texture to our understanding of the relationship that audiences and other characters form with monsters" (71).The third chapter explores the humor of body horror. Gillota seeks to "complicate discussions of body genres by looking at the manner in which body horror texts use humor even as they simultaneously horrify or 'gross out' audience members" (9–10). Taking up films ranging from Freaks (1932) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) to An American Werewolf in London (1981), Re-Animator (1985), and the Final Destination franchise, the chapter explores social norms, gross-out humor, bodily transformations, and slapstick violence (splatstick), showing how they "encourage a mixture of horrific revulsion and laughter" (74–75). Though the chapter engages with Julia Kristeva's concept of the abject, it does not address the carnivalesque, which comically subverts social norms through body grotesqueries.Chapter 4 focuses on horror's use of queer humor, adopting Moe Meyer's definition of camp as "queer parody." Unpacking representations of gender and sexuality in films ranging from The Old Dark House (1932) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) to Jennifer's Body (2004) and the Child's Play franchise, Gillota highlights queer texts and subtexts that alternately vilify queer characters and mock traditional heteronormative social norms. Gillota argues that after the 1930s, horror would not be as "explicitly . . . queer again until the 1970s and 1980s," although he notes the exception of the campy performances of horror icon Vincent Price throughout the 1960s (111). Gillota's omission of The Haunting (1963) here, given its lesbian character Theodora, is remarkable. The chapter makes a passing reference to Judith Butler's Gender Trouble but more sustained engagement with queer theory might have been helpful, as parts of the analysis draw on what feel uncomfortably close to stereotypes.The next chapter considers "the frequent use of awkward social humor, or cringe comedy, in the horror genre," that is, humor "driven by the unflinching portrayal of . . . embarrassing social situations" that evokes feelings of discomfort (10–11). Clearly elucidating the idea of humor as horror and horror as humor, Gillota looks at early examples of awkward humor in The Old Dark House and I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and then identifies Psycho (1960) as a pivotal moment in horror that made awkward humor more common in the genre, as in films like Creep (2014) and Midsommar (2019). Gillota argues that the social transgressions of cringe comedy in horror work to prefigure, even intensify, violent bodily violations, and, in so doing, highlight "larger cultural anxieties about cultural differences or the disruption of social norms" (11). Gillota's discussion of found-footage horror as a means of an unflinching and apparently raw portrayal of human interactions is particularly insightful.The book concludes with a chapter that considers satire, "one of the most celebrated comic modes," by examining works that use humor and horror to provide social critique and advocate change (11). In an in-depth look at the work of George Romero and Jordan Peele through close readings of key scenes in Romero's original zombie trilogy (1968–1985) and of Peele's Get Out (2017) and Us (2019), Gillota focuses on horror's satirical criticism of American race relations while making a case for the lasting impact of both Romero and Peele on the horror genre. Poignantly, the chapter concludes that while "the most common approaches to horror suggest that it primarily works as a dark mirror for our culture," satirical horror not only reflects our culture but also critiques it, "times of national trauma or turmoil" being particularly conducive to such critique (194–95).Overall, Dead Funny broadens our understanding of how humor and horror work together. Gillota's close readings offer new perspectives on familiar topics from evil clowns to the representation of race in Night of the Living Dead that should provoke scholars of both humor and horror to consider different lenses for analyses.