Monday 23 October 2017

Don't Know Whether to Laugh or Scream

Horror-Comedy cross-over, or 'Homedy', seems to be very popular at the moment. And it's obviously going to be popular in the next week or so, since Halloween seems to be a big thing now.

It just wasn't like that when I was growing up in the 80s in England. In this regard, at least, the 80s were simpler times. Overall, society seemed to think it was reasonable not to scare children out of their wits, so that they wouldn't spend the following months unable to sleep.

In those days, Halloween was a bit naff or camp, and was a warm-up to the more exciting Bonfire Night, a few days later: a celebration of the attempted-mass-murder of MPs with hot dogs, fireworks, sparklers and the possibility of a trip to A&E. What's not to like?

Halloween was no big deal, and if you wanted suspense, the incessant adverts about the dangers of fireworks were the most frightening thing you could see on TV in late October.

You can probably tell I'm not a fan of halloween. It's partly because I'm a full-on God-botherer (and, as usual, I'll be cheerfully celebrating Reformation Day on 31st October). It's also because I've never seen any horror films. None of the Freddie films, or the Jason ones or the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I have to say the title put me off the last one.

As far as suspense and mystery goes, my upper limit is early episodes of the X-Files. Yes, if horror was a curry, I'd be sweating over the Chicken Korma and wishing I'd ordered the Butter Chicken instead. (Oddly, on curry, I'm at the other end of the spectrum).

Horror and Comedy

I mention this because I'm interested between the interplay between Horror and Comedy. In some ways, they are very different genres and in others they are very similar. I thought it might be interesting to dig into this for a moment. (If it isn't interesting, here's a picture of a cat dressed as the pope).

The reason I'm nervous about mixing the genres is because they are trying to do totally separate things. Horror is trying to get you to jump in fear. Comedy is (or should be) trying to get you to laugh out loud.

Horror is giving you as little information as possible to keep you in suspense, wondering what's going to happen next. It's trying to confuse you and create mystery. Readers of this blog and my book will know I always say that confusion is the enemy of comedy. If an audience is confused, it can't laugh. One of the reasons I dislike horror, apart from the obvious, is the feeling of continually being confused and wrong-footed.

And yet, comedy relies on wrong-footing your audience. It involves giving them limited information, or sending them in one direction, before pulling them into another. Both are like magic, telling the audience to look in one place, before surprising them in another. Comedy and horror both rely on surprise. Except in horror, it's more of a shock, than a surprise. (I'm hoping to pick this up in a forthcoming book I'm writing on the ethics of comedy and jokes).

Do these similarities in construction mean that horror and comedy go well together? Or are they oil and water? At the moment, I'm not sure.

What It All Comes Down To

However, for me, the main problem with Homedy is not the mechanics, but the execution. It's the fact that the jokes and plotting often lean heavily on referencing specific horror films - films that I haven't seen and will almost certainly never see. This is where the League of Gentlemen began to lose me. To me, Series 1 is one of the funniest TV series that has ever been. It was out-and-out funny. (Remember: there was an audience laugh track.) But then the show drifted away from dark eccentricity and grotesque and closer and closer to horror, and I began to drift in the other direction.

There is nothing intrinsically funny about recreating a scene from a horror film in a comedy. I see this a lot in sitcom scripts that I sometimes get sent and have to script edit or provide notes. Quite often the writer has to perform implausible leaps to get to that spot, and then spend too long once they are there. And I have to ask the awkward question: What's the joke? Why is it funny that our regular characters are re-enacting a scene from The Shining (which I've not seen), The Omen (which I've not seen), or Poltergeist (not seen) or IT, Amityville, Last House on the Left or I Spit on Your Grave (also not seen, not seen, not seen and not seen). As I say, I like laughing. And sleeping well.


These things can be funny for a beat or a moment, but they are not, what I call, load-bearing jokes. Echoes of other genres are fine. Homage to classic film moments can be satisfying. But they're not actually funny. We had a couple of Casablanca references in one episode of Bluestone 42 which, I think, were jokes in their own right. But less is very much more on this.

The Paucity of Parody

Most comedy writers my age probably started out writing a sketch for their friends or colleagues that was a parody of Blind Date. Fifteen years later, it was all Big Brother Sketches. Then is was X-Factor sketches. These work fine but they are ultimately derivative. The format is clear so the jokes work well. And parody is a great place to start, but it's not aspirational comedically. And yet Comedy-Horror seems to be a genre in which lots of people seem to aspire to, and it is often little more than parody. This might be why I find it even more unsatisfactory.

But each to their own. I've no problem with people like horror. I don't understand the fascination or the appeal, but then I don't understand the appeal of horse-racing, ballet or fishing. But that's okay. It takes all sorts to make a world go round. Perhaps that's what Halloween really teaches us. (It doesn't. It really doesn't. But I needed a neat-sounding ending)

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1 comment:

  1. Hi James,

    In an interesting bit of serendipity my first ever commision has just been released on iplayer and it's... a horror-comedy! :-D I link it here as both a shameless plug and a thank you as I constantly referred to the podcast and both your and Dave's blogs to get me through the (at times seemingly endless) redrafting process.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p05jgczn/fright-shorts-4-the-grandmummy-returns#group=p05j73q8

    Thanks again!

    PS if you get a chance to watch you can rest easy that the budget constraints don't stretch to the type of realistic horror that's likely to offend your sensibilities :-)

    Pete

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