humour and horror

Well, I've recently handed in a draft of a chapter on Wittgenstein and Heidegger that's been keeping me from focusing on much else besides for the past few weeks. I don't particularly feel like writing about it at the moment, but I'll need to revise it in the next month or so, so you may not end up being completely deprived of that pleasure. I'm also not going to comment on your last (now long ago) post because you sent me the paper it turned into, and I hope I'll find a chance to read it in the next couple of weeks.

Instead I'm going to talk a bit about humour and horror, which is the topic of a paper I'm working at revising right now. I was hoping I could make some changes and then send it off for publication, but as I find almost always happens when I'm revising something--either in academia or creative writing--I tend to just stare blankly for days, grow to hate myself, and then make a few minor fixes and tell myself that I'll make some real improvements on the next sweep through. I'm right at the beginning of that painful process right now, and I thought it might do myself a double favour to type some of the thoughts up here. First, it might help me organise my own thinking on the topic, and second, it might provoke a response in you that helps my own thinking. No pressure, though. I've hardly been doing that kind of service for you.

Anyway, here's the plot, in rough outline. There are various philosophical questions that come up with regard to humour, foremost being the question of what humour is. A search for a satisfactory theory of humour should presumably do two things for us: give us necessary and sufficient conditions that fix what sorts of things are humorous, and also give some sort of explanation of why these things are humorous, tell us what it is about them that provokes this particular response in us.

One of the more promising lines of attack on this front are so-called "incongruity theories" of humour, which define humour as connected in some way to the perception of incongruity. This claim needs refinement in a number of ways: obviously not everything that's incongruous is humorous, and not all humorous things seem to be necessarily incongruous (laughing at someone behaving in a way that's ridiculously typical of them finds humour not in the incongruity of the behaviour but precisely in how closely it fits that person's typical patterns of behaviour). The counter-example that motivates my paper is horror, which also seems to rely on perceptions of incongruity. But I don't want to take this discovery as evidence of just how ludicrously off-the-mark incongruity theories are, but rather take it as evidence of just how close humour and horror are.

Another point that humour and horror have in common is that they can be regarded in many ways as aesthetic phenomena, and be subjected to aesthetic judgment, but unlike most aesthetic phenomena, their success depends on immediate response. I can mull over a painting and declare on reflection that I think it has a marvellously subtle beauty to it, but if I mull over a joke and on reflection declare that it's funny, that's tantamount to saying the joke's failed. Same with horror: if it fails to scare us, it hasn't done its job.

That said, I think horror isn't really about fear anyway (the only other paper I've found on the comparison between humour and horror argues that horror is incongruity plus fear and that humour is incongruity minus the fear). Horror comes from a deeper sense of something being amiss in the universe, or more precisely, something being amiss in our normally stable sense of self. What's scary about zombies chasing us isn't simply the fear that we're going to die, but the fact that the dead have come to life and that people we knew are no longer people and are trying to kill us. The incongruity that's central to horror is an incongruity in our conception of the human: our sanity depends on there being a sharp line between the human and the inhuman, and horror blurs that line.

Another point worth remarking on with both humour and horror is that the incongruities they rely on require a certain aptness. Not just any incongruity is funny because some incongruities are simply weird. If I see three bananas lying on the sidewalk, that's neither humorous nor horrific, but it is incongruous. Humour relies on incongruous twists that strike us as slyly appropriate: jokes about lascivious priests work because, on one hand, priests are supposed to be celibate--hence the incongruity--but on the other hand, we recognise that, in fact, priests are often nothing of the sort. The incongruities in horror tend to rely on a deeply rooted sense of cosmic justice. The Birds, for instance, starts out with the two protagonists flirting in a dangerously cavalier way, with a love bird at the centre of their flirtation. Soon enough, they learn that birds aren't something to be trifled with, the implication being that neither is love. With both humour and horror, the aptness and the incongruity seem to derive from the discovery or recognition that the world is bound to upset our best-laid plans, that our rationality is limited, that we are finite beings. This characterisation might seem a bit grandiose for describing casual jokes and cheap horror flicks, but I think I can answer that by simply saying that they're superficial instances of deep phenomena.

One line of attempting to define humour would be to say that there's some characteristic of humour itself--to say that humour is an entity out there in the world--by which we can identify it and distinguish it from everything else. My counter-example to show that this can't work is black humour, because black humour--it seems to me--can be either humorous or horrific depending on how we look at it. You could say it's a humorous way of reflecting on horror, but there are also circumstances where the humour simply won't be taken up, and what one person might see as grimly comic another might see as simply horrific. (There's a nice story of Kafka reading the first chapter of The Trial to Max Brod, but being unable to finish because he was laughing so hard.)

More broadly speaking, it seems we can find pretty much anything humorous and pretty much anything horrific in the right frames of mind. (This is one sense in which humour and horror seem as much emotional phenomena as aesthetic phenomena). The point is, first of all, that pretty much anything can strike us as incongruous given the right frame of mind--language itself contains the incongruity of random marks corresponding to meanings--so whatever humour and horror are, they aren't things "out there" to be detected independent of our responses to them.

In prying them apart, I want to say it has something to do with the nature of play. Humour is a species of play, whereas horror isn't, or at least isn't straightforwardly so. What play is and how it works is tremendously complicated and intriguing and I don't have enough to say about it right now. But for the moment, take these as characteristics of play: (1) it involves a kind of distancing, or "as if" behaviour, where we don't take what we're playing at as fully seriously; (2) it's bounded in space and time: there's a kind of "play-ground" in which play is acceptable, but there are subtle rules or principles that govern how and where we can play; (3) play involves creatively developing on a theme, whether it's passing a ball toward scoring a goal or building on jokes. I'm sure I could think of other important characteristics. But the important thing for the moment is that humour involves the distancing aspect of play, which horror lacks. Under the aspect of humour, everything seems remote, and as a result, we feel safe. When the world is laughable, we can't be hurt, because under the aspect of play, important things can't be hurt. In the world of cartoons, Coyote can blow himself up as much as he likes but he won't actually be harmed.

In horror, by contrast, I'd suggest that the notion of precariousness of human identity that I wrote about earlier comes from the fact that nothing feels safe anymore. It's not just that there's a monster that's going to get us, but that the universe is fundamentally out of joint. Horror gives us a world in which play isn't possible.

Both of these responses are important, I claim, and both are related to the fact that the actual occupies a vanishingly small space within the realm of the possible. We tend to think of the way things are as fixed and necessary, but what both humour and horror reveal is that things could be radically otherwise. Depending on how we encounter this discovery, we can either have a sense of distance on the actual that makes it seem laughably trivial, or we can respond with a horrific sense of agoraphobia, realising that how things are is by no means safely established.

Shit, I really have to run, so I'm not going to be able to check over this or say anything about the Symposium--not sure I have much of any interest to say anyway--and also I haven't had a chance to think through the fact that some things are clearly funny that aren't horrific. Horror can sometimes be amusing, but aside from the case of black humour, humour is rarely horrific. I'm not quite sure why. Maybe it's because horror only plays on the precariousness of human identity, so there are vast swathes of humour that aren't susceptible to being viewed as horror.

Sorry this was so hasty and such a mess. Not promising for the paper I want to write.