Ed Gein Jokes: A Bizarre Example of Gallows Humor

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

After his father's death, Ed Gein (1906-1984) was reared by his mother, a religious fanatic with twisted ideas about sex in particular and about life in general. He was unable to function on his own, and after his brother's death (as a result, some claim, of Ed's having murdered him) and his mother's demise, as a result of natural causes, Ed was left alone on the family farm outside Plainfield, Wisconsin. A man without friends, he occasionally babysat for a neighbor, but, otherwise, didn't much interact with the community.

Left alone, he read stories about the Nazis' atrocities and became interested in cross-dressing. Some believe he attempted to bring his mother back by dressing in women's clothes and adopting her personality. To improve on his female mimicry, he added a “torso vest” made from the skinned abdomen, including the breasts, he removed from a female cadaver he'd dug up from a local or nearby cemetery.

Ed also upholstered chairs in human skin, and he made a curtain pull featuring female lips; a lampshade of human skin; a belt decorated with female nipples; masks cut from women's faces; wall hangings of women's skin, breasts, and severed fingers; dresses made of women's skins; an apron made of female breasts and women's faces; and a pair of gloves made from women's skins. He collected women's ears and noses as well.

Charged with first-degree murder in the death of shopkeeper Bernice Worden, Ed pleaded not guilty and was found “mentally incompetent to stand trial” as a result of schizophrenia. He was confined in the Wisconsin Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Waupun, Wisconsin. He was later transferred to the Mendota State Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin, where he died. Although he was tried only for Worden's death, Gein also admitted to having murdered tavern owner Mary Hogan.

Ed Gein inspired Norman Bates, of both Robert Bloch's 1959 novel Psycho and the 1961 movie of the same name, directed by Alfred Hitchcock; Leatherface, of the 1974 movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, directed by Tobe Hooper; Buffalo Bill, of the 1988 Thomas Harris novel The Silence of the Lambs and the eponymous1991 film, directed by Jonathan Demme; and Dr. Oliver Thredson of the television series American Horror Story: Asylum.

There's no doubt about it: Ed was a genuinely creepy guy. In fact, he was so disturbing that, to cope with the revelation of his monstrous crimes, the American public invented Ed Gein jokes of the morbid, gallows humor variety. As the Wikipedia article on this type of humor points out, it is used to make “light of subject matter that is generally considered taboo, particularly subjects that are normally considered serious or painful to discuss.” Ed's deeds certainly qualify as such a topic.

A few Ed Gein jokes can be found on the Internet. Here are a few from the Imgur website:

• What did Ed Gein say as the hearse passed by? “Dig you later, baby!”
• What did Ed Gein say to the sheriff who arrested him? “Have a heart.”
• Ed Gein [was] popular with the ladies. There were always women hanging around his place.
• Why do they let Ed Gein out on New Year's Day? So he can dig up a fresh date.
• Customer: “Bartender, give me a Gein beer.” Bartender: “It has lots of body but no head.”
• Have you heard the Defense Department has called on Ed Gein? They want him to ship arms to Vietnam.

Among others, the Tripod website offers these gems:

• Why did Ed Gein's girlfriend stop going out with him? Because he was such a cut-up.

• Why won't anyone play poker with Ed Gein?

• He might come up with a good hand.

Finally, here are a few by yours truly:

• Ed Gein liked to keep abreast of things
• Ed Gein always put his best foot forward.
• Ed Gein had a grave disposition.
• At bake sales, Ed Gein's pastries didn't sell well: people feared there'd be a finger in every pie.
• As a house guest, Ed Gein expected to be waited on hand and foot.
• Ed Gein was barred from the theater after he took Mark Antony's plea to “lend me your ears” literally.

While it must be admitted that Ed Gein jokes tend to be corny (and a bit juvenile), except my own, of course, we can see how they might help people cope with the astonishingly bizarre, heinous deeds of the insane killer from Plainfield.

Beyond Blood, Guts, and Gore

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Often, we think of horror fiction as a visceral genre, focusing, as it frequently does, on blood and guts and gore. However, the best horror fiction transcends the merely physical and addresses, albeit usually symbolically, those dimensions of our existence that are peculiarly human: the theological, the philosophical, the social, the psychological, and the technological. We are more than bodies. We are ghosts. We are spirits. We are souls. We believe in God, we think about the implications of our perceptions and beliefs, we organize as societies and nations, we emote, and we use tools of spectacular complexity and variety. The best horror fiction addresses these aspects of our existence.

One reason that William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971) is a great novel (and a movie, released in 1973) is that it explores the problem of evil and the meaning of true faith, showing that, more than being mere belief, such faith involves trust in God; love for God, for oneself, and for others; and the needs to forgive and to be forgiven. The novel also suggests that evil is not only real but that it is also of a spiritual, rather than of a psychological or a social, nature (although evil may be expressed psychologically or socially--or in other ways).

Part of the reason that The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005) is a good, if not great, film, is that it is both theological, questioning whether God and the devil actually exist or are merely metaphors for experience that is not fully understood, and philosophical, asking whether human beings should consider themselves to be nothing more than one of the many products of evolution. There are consequences for both world views, the movie suggests, and it is the filmmaker's intent to force a decision for or against one worldview and its consequences or the other Weltanschauung and its consequences. According to the film's director, Scott Derrickson:

What I wanted to do was write something that wasn’t propaganda, wasn’t about trying to persuade people to think the way that I do, but recognize the fundamental importance of that question, the central question — does the spiritual realm exist? Is there a devil, and more importantly, is there a God? And if so, what are the implications of that? I don’t care what you believe — those are questions to be reckoned with… Everyone has to answer that question. And in some ways everyone lives their life based on what they believe about that question.

Many of Stephen King’s novels examine the effects of community life upon the residents of small towns, focusing upon the pressures upon, and the consequences to, individuality and personality that social mores, traditions, and expectations tend to exert and have; among the best of these novels, perhaps (but by no means the best of King‘s work to date), are Carrie (1974), Needful Things (1991), and Under the Dome (2009).

Perhaps the best-know and certainly one of the artistically finest horror films that delves into the mysteries of the human personality is Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), which is based upon Robert Bloch’s novel of the same title (1959). How much of our behavior as adults is shaped by our childhood experiences, and, in particular, by the hand that rocks the cradle? If the challenges of childhood and adolescence take different avenues than is typical or normal, might a boy grow up to be a monster rather than a man? “A boy’s best friend is his mother,” Norman Bates declares, but, clearly, in his case, this was not true. Why? The film perhaps leaves more questions unanswered than answered, despite the psychiatrist’s explanation of the protagonist’s behavior at the end of the film, but it brings to the attention of its millions of viewers the importance of seeking answers to questions of nature and nurture, of learning and genetics. In the process, the film makes it quite clear that people are more than merely food for worms, for machines, whether of flesh or of steel, operate according to their design, without being affected by the attitudinal, emotional, or other cognitive functions that are peculiar to creatures that have been created in the image and likeness of God.

Dean Koontz’s Demon Seed (1977), in which a computer impregnates a woman who gives birth to a cyborg infant, explores the implications of the human-technology dynamic, admittedly taken to rather absurd extremes. It’s a reworking, of sorts, of the Frankenstein motif, wherein the monster is, quite literally, a ghost in a machine, but one of technological, rather than of divine, conception and origin. A 1977 movie, of the same title, directed by Donald Cammell, is based upon Koontz’s book.

It is interesting (and, one might add, significant) that several of these novels and movies are based, allegedly, at least, upon actual events. The Exorcist is based upon a titanic spiritual battle that Blatty heard about during his college days. The Exorcism of Emily Rose is based upon the horrific experiences of  Anneliese Michel. Although Carrie is an entirely fictional work, the protagonist, Carietta (Carrie) White, is “based on a combination of two girls in King's past; one of them went to school with him, the other was a student of his,” Timeline’s Internet article “Carrie becomes King‘s debut novel,” points out:

The young girl King went to school with lived down the street from him when he lived in Durham, Maine. King recalls, in an interview with Charles L. Grant for Twilight Zone Magazine (Apr 1981), “She was a very peculiar girl who came from a very peculiar family. Her mother wasn’t a religious nut like the mother in Carrie; she was a game nut, a sweepstakes nut who subscribed to magazines for people who entered contests . . . The girl had one change of clothes for the entire school year, and all the other kids made fun of her. I have a very clear memory of the day she came to school with a new outfit she'd bought herself. She was a plain-looking country girl, but she'd changed the black skirt and white blouse--which was all anybody had every seen her in--for a bright-colored checkered blouse with puffed sleeves and a skirt that was fashionable at the time. And everybody made worse fun of her because nobody wanted to see her change the mold.”

Needful Things, King says, was inspired by the excesses of televangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker, and Under the Dome’s villain is based upon Vice-President Dick Cheney--as King sees him, of course. Psycho is based upon the murderous Ed Gein.

(It is also interesting and probably significant that several of these writers and filmmakers are Christian: Blatty is a Catholic, Derrickson is a Protestant, King is a believer but differs in his belief from traditional Protestants, and Koontz is a Catholic.)

Basing one’s fiction, entirely or in part, upon real-world people, situations, or events is one way to ensure that one has realistic, believable fodder upon which to base one’s theological, philosophical, social, psychological, and technological explorations, examinations, insights, and criticisms. That it is possible to do so underscores one of the points of horror fiction in general--and perhaps the biggest point of them all--which is that human beings, both actual and fictional, are more than blood, guts, and gore. There is a spiritual as well as a physical dimension to human existence; if there were not, horror itself would be impossible and there would be neither novels nor movies based upon this emotional reaction to external and internal evil that, like goodness, is both transcendent and immanent to human beings themselves.

"Psycho" and "The Birds": The Reason They Endure

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Looking back at some of the “classic” horror movies of the forties, fifties, and sixties, it’s difficult to determine just what (and why) these films were considered frightening. This difficulty applies even to such films as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and The Birds.

Maybe I can get some insight into this matter by considering some of these movies’ reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. This site awards Psycho (1960) a 99% “fresh” rating, meaning that 99 percent of the site’s reviews award it a favorable review. What is the bases of these favorable reviews?

One critic views the movie as a trailblazer.

Another critic considers it “shocking.”

A third opines that “Alfred Hitchcock should be credited with making the first slasher film” and thereby providing the “template” for future films of this type.

Still another commentator regards the movie as being “more analyzed” than any other.

According to another pundit, the film is “impressive” in having been well crafted.

Another critic seems to attribute the movie’s success to Janet Leigh’s attractiveness and taste in brassieres: “Janet Leigh, stalking around in pointy brassieres, making bird-gestures, and flirting with the coprophobic Perkins, is one of cinema's most deliciously perverse pleasures.”

One authority claims the film’s popularity derives from several of its scenes: “The music, the setting, the shower scene, the mother in the cellar... everything about this iconic film has passed into cinema history. “

How about the film’s “manipulation of audience identification” and “style”? One critic sees these attributes as being largely responsible for the movie’s enduring appeal.

None of these comments seem all that insightful concerning Psycho’s attractiveness to moviegoers over half a century.

What about Rotten Tomatoes’ take on the lasting popularity of another horror film by Hitchcock, namely The Birds (1963)? The website labels this movie 95% “fresh,” with reviewers offering the following comments concerning the film:

“The only thing dated is the special effects. The suspense holds up well.”

“Although not as horrifically shocking as ‘Psycho,’ [sic] ‘The Birds’ [sic] is a more sophisticated film, and represents a high watermark [sic] in the prolific career of a true maestro of cinema.”

“Alfred Hitchcock's most abstract film (1963), and perhaps his subtlest, still yielding new meanings and inflections after a dozen or more viewings.”

“More novelty than spectacle, but overall a chilling exercise in nihilistic terror.”

“Still a dream come true after you've met enough Californians.”

“It's fierce and Freudian as well as great cinematic fun, with ample fodder for the amateur psychologist following up on Hitch's tortuous involvement with his leading ladies.”

“Inventive classic.”

Are these reviewers’ comments any more helpful in establishing this film’s almost half-a-century-long appeal? You decide.

For my part, I have a simple, but, I think, affective, explanation for these movie’s continuing appeal. They were filmed in more innocent times, before the multiplicity of media sources and choices, when the concept of the serial killer was fairly new and the crimes of Ed Gein, upon whom Norman Bates is based, were both contemporary, shocking millions across the country and around the world, thanks to the news and to Robert Bloch’s novel. (The term “serial killer” was not coined until the 1970s, Wikipedia tells us, and Psycho was released in 1960.) In other words, for the relatively innocent audiences of the day, Norman Bates represented a new kind of bogeyman--the transvestite momma’s boy-become-killer whose penchant for helpless young women made every young woman a potential victim of similar homicidal maniacs. Why does the movie continue to appeal to the more jaded audiences of today? I think it does so because of its nostalgic nature, hearkening back, as it does, to a day in which relatively innocent audiences were confronted with a new type of bogeyman.

How, then, do I explain the original and the continuing popularity of The Birds? I think that it represents society’s unconscious fear that something will go wrong. What, precisely, will go wrong, when it will go wrong, and why it will go wrong are unknown and, perhaps, unknowable. They are also, strangely enough, unimportant. What matters is the uneasy, the disquieting, the unsettling and vague notion, the inkling, the hunch, the gut feeling, the intuition that something, sooner or later, is going to happen, something that probably makes no sense and has no business happening, something as absurd as it horrific--and catastrophic: the end of time, the end of the world, the apocalypse that mystics have predicted, again and again, off and on for centuries and millennia. In other words, The Birds symbolizes the haunting suspicion that we don’t really quite deserve the bounty of riches with which we’ve been blessed and that, someday, harpies of some sort, will be sent to us from above to harass and punish us, stripping away the blessings and destroying the bounty. In Hitchcock’s film, the harpies are birds of all kinds, coming, it seems, from everywhere, attacking Bodega Bay, California today and, tomorrow, the world. . . .

What’s So Weird About Weird Tales?

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

A pulp magazine of horror and the supernatural, Weird Tales has had an on-again, off-again publication history that spans from 1923 to the present. In its tumultuous career, the magazine has published many authors whose names have subsequently earned fame in a variety of fiction genres.

Weird Tales cover art by Hannes Bok.

Among the names that one can drop in relation to Weird Tales are those of Ray Bradbury, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard, Theodore Sturgeon, and Tennessee Williams. (Yes, the Tennessee Williams.)

During its history, the magazine also has provided opportunities for a number of illustrators to showcase their artwork, both on its covers and within its pages. Included among their number are Margaret Brundage, Virgil Finlay, and Hannes Bok.

Weird Tales cover art by Margaret Brundage.

A selection of Weird Tales’ current stories includes Jay Lake’s “Thomas Edison and His Telegraphic Harpoon” (“The steam ram City of Hoboken moved like a drunken bear in all weathers, pistons groaning with the pain of metal as the great machine walked the prairies”); Karen Heuler’s “Landscape, With Fish” (“He never actually saw the fish take off — he always caught them flying, instead — but he had to assume they did a kind of leap first, so he put up a higher fence”); Mikal Trimm and Marcie Lynn Tentchoff‘s “In the Company of Women” (“Seamus stared down into the grave, shaking from more than just the frost-tinged air. She’d been pretty once, true, but not now, surely not now”); and Lisa Mantchev’s “Six Scents” (“Men find it hard to fall in love with a dead girl. They tell her it’s a turn-off that they take her hand at the movies and a finger lands in the popcorn”).

Weird Tales cover art by Virgil Finlay.

The genre’s writers, it seems, are increasingly women, and the stories’ tone has gone from the sublime to the ridiculous. Weird Tales’ stories have stopped taking their own genre seriously, a fact which marks the passing of a once-great source of superior pulp fiction of the horror kind. Today, unfortunately, that’s about all that’s weird about Weird Tales.

Guest Speaker: Robert Bloch

Poe & Lovecraft

Robert Bloch, author of Psycho

Comparisons between Edgar Allan Poe and Howard Phillips Lovecraft are, I suppose, inevitable; seemingly, in recent years they are also interminable.

I shall not, therefore, repeat the usual recital of similarities to be found within their work--there will be no mention of black cats, revenants, or Antarctic settings per se.

But at the same time I have no intention of making a calculated bid for attention by deliberately asserting, as some have also declared, that no real resemblance exists aside from superficial employment of stock characters and themes common to virtually all stories in the genre.

To me, this is an untenable statement: Lovecraft, like every writer of fantasy and horror fiction subsequent to Poe, was necessarily influenced by the work of his predecessor--and to certain extent his work needs must be derivative in some slight sense. Actually, Lovecraft's homage to Poe in his essay "Supernatural Horror In Literature," indicates a degree of appreciation and admiration which leaves no doubt as to the profound impression made upon him by the earlier master.

But to me the most fruitful area of comparison lies within an examination of the backgrounds and personalities of the writers themselves.

Consider the facts. Both Poe and Lovecraft were New England born. Both were, to all intents and purposes, fatherless at an early age. Both developed a lifelong affinity for poetry and the elements of a classical education. Both utilized archaisms in their writing styles and affected personal eccentricities which in time became consciously cultivated.

Although Poe spent a part of his youth in England and traveled along the Atlantic seaboard in later life--and while Lovecraft ventured up into Canada and down into Florida on vacations a few years prior to his death--neither man ever ventured west of the Alleghenies. Lovecraft, on one occasion, did skirt them to visit E. Hoffman Price briefly in his New Orleans home, but essentially he and Poe were Easterners. Their outlook was, to a marked degree, provincial; even parochial.

Both men distrusted "foreigners" in the mass: both retained a profound admiration for the English. These attitudes are plainly evident in their work, which is many particulars removed and remote form the main current of American life.

A reader attempting to capture some glimpse of the United States in the 1830-1850 period would gain small enlightenment from the poetry and fiction of Poe.

At a time when the entire nation was engaged in a westward thrust, beginning with the peregrinations of the mountain men and ending with the Gold Rush in the year of Poe's death, one searches in vain for a wet which does not seemingly even exist in his literary compass.

Byronic heroes sequestered in British and continental locales scarcely reflect the American attitudes or aptitudes in the era of Old Hickory, Davy Crockett, the fall of the Alamo, the Mexican War and the growing turmoil over slavery.

Nor would a reader find more typically American protagonists amongst the pendants, professors and regionally-oriented recluses of Lovecraft's tales, in which there's scarcely a hint of the manners and mores of the Roaring Twenties or the Great Depression which followed in the ensuing decade. Aside from a few remarks regarding the influx of immigrants and concomitant destruction of old folkways and landmarks, plus brief mentions of the (intellectually) "wild" college set, Lovecraft ignores the post WW1 Jazz Age in its entirety: Coolidge, Hoover, FDR, Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, Al Capone, Valentino, Mencken and the prototypes of Babbit have no existence in HPL's realm. It is difficult to believe that Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a literary contemporary of Ernest Hemingway.

And yet a further comparison between Lovecraft and Poe remains; one of profound importance in any consideration of their work, because it softens any charge that two writers were totally unaware of the actual world and unrealistic in their treatment of their times.

I refer, of course, to their mutual interest in science. Both Poe and Lovecraft were acute observers of the scientific and pseudo-scientific developments of their respective days, and both men utilized thee latest theories and discoveries in their writing. It is only necessary to cite Poe's use of mesmerism, his employment of the balloon hoax, his detailing of data in the Arthur Gordon Pym novella, to prove the point.

Lovecraft, for his part, relies on scientific background material in his Pym-like At the Mountains of Madness, "The Shadow Out of Time" and other efforts; notable is his immediate adoption of the newly discovered "ninth planet" in "The Whisperer in Darkness."

Lovecraft's interest in astronomy undoubtedly led to his increasing interest in other fields of scientific endeavor, just as Poe's early experiences at West Point must have fostered his preoccupation with codes an ciphers. And both men, as professional writers, were well and widely-read in the contemporary work of their day: Poe as a working critic, demonstrates his knowledge in his nonfictional efforts and Lovecraft, in his correspondence, proves himself no stranger to Proust, Joyce, Spengler and Freud.

But the point is that Poe and Lovecraft deliberately chose to turn their backs on contemporary styles and subject-matter and created their own individual worlds of fantasy. In this above all else they were similar.

And in this, above all else, we readers of Poe and Lovecraft are fortunate indeed.

We shall never know, and never care, what Edgar Allan Poe thought of Andy Jackson's "kitchen cabinet" or how H. P. Lovecraft regarded the Teapot Dome scandal. Small loss, when both have given us glimpses of worlds peculiarly and provocatively their very own.

For the final similarity is this--Poe and Lovecraft are our two American geniuses of fantasy, comparable each to the other, but incomparably superior to all the rest who follow in their wake.

This article was first published in Ambrosia #2 (August, 1973), © 1973 Alan Gullette and Robert Bloch. It was subsequently revised slightly by the author and reprinted in H.P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. S. T. Joshi (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1980), pp. 158-160, © 1980 Ohio University Press.