The Humor of Horror (Or Is It the Horror of Humor?), Part 3

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Besides Gahan Wilson and Charles Addams, a third cartoonist who often finds humor in horror (or horror in humor) is James Thurber.

Thurber's cartoons often rely on implication. His artwork and captions, working together, suggest a conclusion, which Thurber leaves to his readers to infer. Thus, his work is one part of a two-way communication between himself, as artist, and his reader. Of course, in most instances, Thurber is pretty clear about the conclusion to be drawn.

His female figures often dwarf his male figures, suggesting the way his men—often husbands—see their wives. Henpecked, the submissive male characters are timid; they are careful not to offend or annoy their bigger, dominant spouses, women who could crush them by their sheer size alone.

In one cartoon, a large woman is seated on a couch with a much smaller male figure. She looks demure, with her hands folded on her lap, as she looks down at the little man beside her (whose posture makes it appear that he is about to bolt from her presence). Smiling, but looking directly at him, with a gaze that suggests the possibility of danger, if not madness, declares, “If you can keep a secret, I'll tell you how my husband died.”

Despite the fact that the body of the man beside her is turned—he has to look over his shoulder to maintain eye contact with her—and he looks as though he is about to flee for his life, his closeness to her suggests he might be a suitor, one who, perhaps, is having second thoughts about becoming involved with her. If so, is she asserting her dominance over him now, by delivering an indirect threat against his life. If she murdered her husband, as her maniacal leer and her possession of a secret concerning the cause of his death suggests, perhaps she is suggesting that the same fate could await him, should he attempt to assert his will in their relationship.

Role reversal, once again, suggests a horror that might not be apparent, the secret terror that may lie at the heart of a relationship in which one person asserts absolute dominance over another under the ever-present threat of death.

Another of Thurber's cartoons has an existentialist bent. Engaged, presumably, in a rat race, finely dressed men and women rush past each other, in opposite directions, without exchanging so much as a glance, a smile, or a greeting. Behind them, in back of a wrought-iron fence, the “DESTINATIONS” mentioned in the cartoon's caption await them in a cemetery whose headstones bear common names, such as “Bill,” “Mary,” and “Jones” or, in the distance, are altogether illegible and, therefore, anonymous. The cartoon almost begs the question, What value does life—and ambition—have when it ends in death?

Finding humor in opposites, especially those as significant as life and death or purpose and meaninglessness, can be an effective means of unearthing horror.

The Humor of Horror (Or Is It the Horror of Humor?), Part 1

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Horror movies often include a humorous scene or two, ostensibly as a means of relieving the tension that results from sustained, intensifying suspense. Frequently of the black humor type, such visual jokes are intended, perhaps, to refocus both the teller and the listener on the normal, the customary or traditional, the everyday, rather than on the abnormal, the non-traditional, or the extraordinary.

Alfred Hitchcock presents Psycho's audience with a humorous scene after Norman Bates kills Marion Crane. He has loaded her corpse and meager possessions into her car and pushed it into a lake to dispose of the evidence of his crime. As Norman looks on, the car begins to sink. It continues to slip deeper and deeper into the water, but, then, abruptly, it stops, only partly submerged, and Norman's expression, partly anticipation, partly glee, up to this point also suddenly changes, to one of not only worry but also panic.

Unless the car fully sinks, he himself (and his “mother”) will sink, as his charade is exposed and he is confined to a mental asylum or a prison for his “mother's” dastardly deed. At the last moment, the car does, in fact, completely submerge, and Norman looks relieved. He has gotten away with murder, after all, it seems. The television series Dirty Little Liars provides its audience with plenty of black humor, much of it through its allusions to such Hitchcock films as Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window, and others.

Finding the humor amid horror is a difficult task. If done clumsily, the use of humor to alleviate tension can backfire on the author. In times of hyper-sensitivity and political correctness, it is especially important not to offend readers' sensibilities, even in horror fiction. However, looking to cartoonists whose work involves the macabre can offer some pointers for effective use of black humor, although writers should use them at their own risk.

One such cartoonist is Gahan Wilson, many of whose works appeared in Playboy magazine over a period of years. Most of them include a gruesome twist. For example, most of us do not fear optometrists. We go to them voluntarily, trusting ourselves to their care, believing them, as men and women of medicine, to have our welfare at heart and in mind. It is the violation of this trust by a mad doctor that underlies the ghoulish humor of this cartoon:

In reading the eye chart, we assume the role of the patient; we are trusting, unaware, and helpless as we read of the optometrist's intention to kill us. As we read the chart, the letters tend to blur, reminding those of us whose vision isn't perfect (many of us, alas, who are of the patient's age), suggesting the additional horror that, even with our fate spelled out for us, unable to read the writing on the wall, we are in danger of being killed where we sit, unaware of our fate until it is too late.

This cartoon offers us a technique widely used in horror movies (and, less often, in novels): have the viewer (or the reader) assume (or, more often, identify with) the role of the helpless victim.

In this cartoon, Wilson shows the absurdity of a popular pastime, a supposed “sport” in which armed men kill animals that have no chance against their killers. In the cartoon, the hunter's hubris has led him to kill every animal he and his friend have encountered, as the presence of blood-splattered snow and the friend's ironic comment suggest: “Congratulations, Baer—I think you've wiped out the species!”

Naming the shooter Baer doubles the cartoon's irony, since the name sounds like “bear.” Like a bear, Baer is a predator. Unlike a bear, however, Baer kills for “sport,” not survival, killing every animal he encounters. His smug, slightly crazed look suggests that he is insane, which, in turn, suggests that hunting, at least the way he practices it, is also insane.

This cartoon's technique is to exaggerate a commonplace activity to reveal the absurdity of the pastime and those who participate in it.

Many horror movie plots, novels, and short stories take place in isolated settings. This cartoon is also set in such a locale. A small eatery in the middle of nowhere, near a two-lane blacktop next to bare mountains possibly in Alaska or the Yukon, judging by the aurora borealis seen in the night sky, bears bright signs on its rooftop and exterior walls: “EAT.” As a gigantic monster of vague, gelatin-like form, crawls over a ridge, toward the roadside cafe, one employee, the cook, possibly, says to another, the waiter, perhaps, “My God—do you suppose it can read?”

This cartoon turns the tables on humanity. It's all right to be a carnivore, Wilson seems to suggest, as long as we are the carnivores. To be the eater rather than the eaten is all well and good, but if the roles are reversed, the horror of the eat-or-be-eaten world is exposed. With apologies to Socrates, in some cases, it seems, the unexamined life may be worth living.

Role reversal is another way that cartoonists like Wilson reveal the horror inherent in everyday practices that we take for granted.

A study of other Wilson cartoons reveals other techniques for showing the horror in everyday situations and practices, but, in our next post, let's take a look at the work of Charles Addams, another artist known for disclosing the humorous within the horrific.

Gahan Wilson's Poignant Moments of Existential Angst

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Wikipedia offers a brief, if succinct, albeit uncited, description of cartoonist Gahan Wilson's work:

Wilson's cartoons and illustrations are drawn in a playfully grotesque style and have a dark humor . . . . Wilson's work is . . . contemporary, gross, and confrontational, featuring atomic mutants, subway monsters[,] and serial killers [and] Wilson often has a very specific point to make.

Wilson's cartoons frequently appeared in Playboy magazine, their offbeat humor a favorite with readers.

His work is similar to that of such other artists as Charles Addams (of The Addams Family fame), Edward Gorey, and Gary Larson (“The Far Side”).

The source of the humor in some of Wilson's cartoons is fairly obvious, but, in others, it is subtler. For example, the horror of this cartoon isn't immediately apparent, but, when one “gets it,” the horror—or, in this case, the terror—is apt to be all the more striking.

The cartoon addresses the solipsistic fear that “life is but a dream,” but who, we may wonder, is the dreamer and who is merely the figment of the dreamer's imagination?

A woman, seated at a table in a living room, is about to put the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle into place. In doing so, she pauses and looks down, to her right. What she has noticed isn't shown to the viewer, as the object of her concern (she looks uneasy, rather than merely curious) is out of frame.

It is only after taking in the big picture, as it were, that the viewer carefully considers the puzzle that the woman is completing, only to find that it is identical to the “big picture,” right down to the missing corner piece that the woman holds, both in the smaller image and the larger one.

Now, we understand her concern. It is not an unseen object that disturbs her, but her realization, born of her discovery of the parallels between her situation and the puzzle she is completing, that she is not the center of her universe, nor is she the captain of her soul. She is merely one in an infinite series of repeated images in which none of the versions of “her” is ever the final, ultimate one. She is merely the copy of a copy among countless other copies, all identical and all terrifying.

If her situation is locked into a series of identical situations over which she nor any other of her various “selves” has any control, her existence is as meaningless as the pastime at which she occupies a leisure moment, because her whole life is this moment, eternally, nothing else and nothing more.

It takes a rare talent to convey so much in a single cartoon panel, without (in this case), even the need of a caption. Such condensed “summaries” of existential angst are immediate and poignant enough to inspire longer works of narrative fiction. Imagine what Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, or Edgar Allan Poe might do in developing such a germ of an idea.

--or what YOU might do!

Story Ideas Journal

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Like many other writers, Mark Twain kept a notebook--or a series of the, actually--I which, among other entries, he jotted down story ideas. I find that the USA Today’s “Across the USA: News From Every State” column, quite unintentionally, I’m sure, provides fruit for me (and for others), on a daily basis, for story ideas, ripe for the plucking. Notebooks and notebooks of the, in fact. By applying a bit of Gahan Wilson logic or Gary Larson perspective to the news items reported in this column, I find that I can transform at least a few of the straightforward reports into ideas for potential horror stories. For example, five of the fifty reports, or a full ten percent of the, in the September 27, 2010 issue of the newspaper show promise, which is to say, with a little revision., could become the bases of stories from the dark side of the soul. Courtesy of the great states of Louisiana, Montana, Texas, Virginia, and Washington, here they are, followed by my revisions to them and the bases of the revisions.

[Original:] Louisiana: Leesville--Work on a new veterans cemetery begins this week next to Fort Polk. Mike Sewell, project manager for Pat Williams Construction, said a survey crew should be preparing for timber clearing in about two weeks. He said the $6.1 million project should be completed late next year.

Revision: Louisiana: Leesville--Work on a new veterans cemetery begins this week next to Fort Polk. The $6.1 million project, the project manager for the contractor said, will kick off the U. S. military’s combined forces’ Operation Alpha, which is expected to ignite a theater-wide war in the Middle East, requiring at least 100,00 graves by the end of the anticipated five-year conflict. (Story Idea)

Basis of Revision: The revision is based on a reversal of cause and effect, assuming that cemeteries occasion casualty-producing wars rather than answering the need for burial sites that is caused by wars--in other words, that the cemeteries are completed prior to the wars that are fought to fill the cemeteries.

[Original:] Montana: Missoula--The art work of a former war prisoner who created drawings of atrocities he witnessed while the Japanese held him during World War II has found a home at the Montana Museum of Art and Culture. The museum announced that it has acquired 11 oil paintings and nearly 80 drawings by Ben Steele, 92. The Montana native was taken prisoner when he was 23.

Revision: Montana: Missoula--The art work of a former war prisoner who created drawings of atrocities he witnessed while the Japanese held him during World War II has found a home at the Montana Museum of Magical Realism. The museum curator announced that the 11 oil paintings and nearly 80 drawings by Ben Steele, 92, represent “performance art,” that is capable of magically recreating the actual experience that the artist underwent so that whoever views his work will actually live through the same atrocities that the artist experienced when he was taken prisoner at age 23. (Story Idea)

Basis of Revision: By transforming drawings and paintings into items of magical “performance art” that recreate the artists’ experiences as a prisoner of war so faithfully and completely that viewers actually undergo the atrocities that the art depicts, this story idea plays with the idea of art as a representation of human experience, taking the concept to fantastic extremes.

[Original:] Texas: Houston--Area residents turned over more than 3,000 pounds of expired, unused and unwanted prescription medications to federal authorities. The Saturday collection was the U. S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s first effort to round up unused prescription medications at 3,400 locations nationwide as part of its campaign.

Revision: Texas: Houston--Area residents turned over more than 3,000 unwanted infants and toddlers to federal authorities. The Saturday collection was the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services’ first effort to round up unwanted children at 3,400 locations nationwide for use in cloning and bioengineering research. (Story Idea) This story idea obviously lends itself well to satirical treatment of the federal government’s heavy-handed intrusions into citizens’ lives. (Other horrific ideas might stem from the substitution of “virgins” or “spouses” for “prescription drugs.”)

Basis of Revision: The substitution of babies for prescription drugs is an interesting revision to the original news report, to be sure, and one that calls for explanation; the explanation is as monstrous as the federal bureaucracies that involve themselves in such “health” concerns as abortion, fetal stem cell research and similar matters, replaced, in my revision with “cloning and bioengineering research.”

[Original:] Virginia: Lexington--Washington and Lee University is stepping up efforts to recruit Jewish students as part of efforts to create a more diverse campus. Jewish students currently make up 4.5% of about 1,760 undergraduate students. Recruitment efforts include attending college fairs and visiting Jewish schools, community centers, and teen groups.

Revision: Virginia: Lexington--Washington and Lee University is stepping up efforts to recruit human oddities as part of efforts to create a more diverse campus. Human oddities, or “freaks,” as they were once know currently make up 4.5% of about 1,760 undergraduate students. Recruitment efforts include attending county fairs and visiting circuses and carnival sideshows. (Story Idea) This politically incorrect storyline is certainly insensitive and bigoted, but it is one that pokes fun at political correctness and, as such, could lend itself to a satirical send-up of social and collegiate concerns for “diversity.”

Basis of Revision: Again, by simply substituting one group of people (“human oddities”) for another (“Jewish” students), an unlikely and, in this case, offensive, storyline suggests itself that could have horrific possibilities.

[Original:] Washington: Bellingham--State officials said they stopped a boat that was contaminated by zebra mussels before the invasive species could spread in the state’s waters. Officers with the Department of Fish and Wildlife and Washington State Patrol in Cle Elum inspected the boat being hauled from Michigan to British Columbia.

Revision: Washington: Bellingham--State officials said they stopped a boat that was contaminated by extraterrestrial spores that could have fertilized animal ova, resulting in a hybridized alien-animal life form such as the world has never seen. (Story Idea) The original report could also have changed by substituting an alien virus for the “zebra mussels,” causing a potential pandemic or by replacing “zebra mussels” with a reference to an extraterrestrial germ or other agent that causes a reverse-terraforming of the Earth that makes it inhabitable to humans but livable for the aliens who will soon arrive to replace the humans they’ve killed in advance of their arrival.

Basis of Revision: Substitution of terms.

Every day, USA Today provides writers with another column featuring “news from every state.” If only two items per day result in potential ideas for horror stories, a year will provide 730 entries to one’s journal of story ideas. Very likely, the column will suggest many more. If one generates as many as five each day, as I gleaned from among today’s news items, a year’s yield will provide a whopping 1,825 entries--way more than even the most prolific writer could hope to use in a lifetime!