Scary Funny

Horror and comedy can be particularly tricky genres to create in. Both rely to some degree on shocking and surprising audiences, and seeking to create shock and surprise tends to lead towards uncomfortable and loaded topics. This can be difficult to handle responsibly, and many creators never try, preferring instead to merely revel in unpleasantness, declaring that anyone who doesn’t enjoy their work just doesn’t “get it”. This kind of attention to detail and implication can be challenging and scary, and it’s entirely understandable that one would want to opt out of this challenge – but doing so is just a show of lazy and careless thought, an abdication of artistic responsibility. An artist is largely defined by their ability to see from the eyes of differing prospective audiences, and if their imagination in this regard can’t extend to victims of trauma, systemic violence, and so forth that doesn’t speak well of that imagination. We choose what audience we care about: If that audience is solely people who have no vulnerabilities we could carelessly abrade, people who can embrace “offensive” content because they have no skin in the game, we have selected only the most insulated among us and are working to build something to further insulate them, make something devoid of thought and empathy, the hollowest sort of art. It is galling that some people choose to wear this as a badge of honor.

Other artists, who care more about the specifics of their content and what it conveys, strive to ensure these troubling topics are grounded in context and treated with respect. Centering the narrative on the powerless over the powerful, ensuring that the characters have personality and motive, writing stories where acts of cruelty and kindness have consequences rather than merely being signposts for how you’re meant to regard a character – the rules for treating complex and painful topics responsibly are much the same as the rules for writing responsibly in any case. The burden is of accuracy and thoroughness and empathy, and anyone who is creating any art for any audience should be prepared to take these on.

Happily, along with these expectation towards boundary-pushing and shock value, horror and comedy also have other traits that make these expectations easier to work with. Absurdity, surrealism, fantastical elements and nonsensical contrivances can work to distance these uncomfortable topics and make them less immediately threatening. Scenarios can become so over-the-top and implausible, so distanced from the more prosaic cruelties that they reference, that they become relatively cartoonish and non-threatening – threats of capitalistic callousness and sexual violence get extracted and distanced into space stations and vicious aliens, minority integration into high society heightened into absurd farce, liberal racist neo-colonialism into weird brain-snatching conspiracies, and so forth. These genres serve as wrappers to express common anxieties, then to either heighten or defuse them, different tensions distilled and diffused, abstracted and made concrete, made real and unreal. In so doing, they give the audience space to understand themselves in relation to these anxieties, to consider meaning and implications.

Most comedy and horror focus on some sort of outsider character or group – in comedy most often this is the protagonist, some bumbling fish out of water or slick troublemaker whose antics are generally harmless and who we can root for. In horror, this outsider is most often the antagonist, a violent spirit, dedicated killer or superhuman beast, whose behaviors are far from harmless. As an outsider, these forces work to interrupt a status quo – but often also are causally related to that status quo. After all, one cannot have an outsider without defining an inside which excludes them. Ghosts are the latent consequences of old atrocities, the kooky loner’s loneliness is imposed upon him by a world that treats him with contempt, the monster is only a threat because the structures meant to protect and contain it have failed, and so forth. Depending on emphasis, these basic genre elements can be used to create and reify fear of a system that has failed us or to create and reify fear of the outsider – can be used to justify malignant xenophobia or interrogations of the structure of power.

Occasionally, this structure is inverted: In Get Out, the protagonist the outsider, stumbling into a sedate but secretly sinister world, whereas in What About Bob the protagonist is a relatively mundane therapist endlessly irritated by the oddball Bob. Movies with this inversion sometimes nudge up against the boundaries of genre classification – some describe Get Out as a comedic horror film, and many find What About Bob somewhat unsettling as a comedy.

When we create comedy or horror, we create a narrative about who may be mocked and who must be feared. These genres exist at the fringes of societal consciousness, the places where we’re still not sure how we feel about ideas and concepts, people and places, and seek to grapple with that tension. The funniest comedy has a tinge of fear while the scariest horror as a tinge of absurdity, and whether tension swings towards relief or shock can rest on a knife’s edge – and, as we learn time and time again, things that we used think were funny come to seem horrifying in retrospect.