Humor and Horror

Different Emotions, Similar Linguistic Processing Strategies

Lena Straßburger

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9783110764802
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Despite their opposite emotional effects, humor and horror are highly similar phenomena. They both can be traced back to (the detection, resolution, and emotional elaboration of) incongruities, understood as semantic violations through unexpected combinations of oppositional information. However, theoretical and experimental comparisons between humor and resolvable incongruities that elicit other emotions than exhilaration have been lacking so far. To gain more insights into the linguistic differences between humor and horror and the cognitive real-time processing of both, a main concern of this book is to discuss the transferability of linguistic humor theories to a systematic horror investigation and directly compare self-paced reading times (SPR), facial actions (FACS), and event-related brain potentials (ERP) of normed minimal quadruplets with frightening and humorous incongruities as well as (in)coherent stimuli. The results suggest that humor and horror share cognitive resources to detect and resolve incongruities. To better distinguish humor from neighboring phenomena, this book refines current humor theories by incorporating humor and horror in a cognitive incongruity processing model.

1 Horror: How to scream because of incongruity

The audience at Hollywood’s Dolby Theater was spellbound

when the disguised moderator opened the golden envelope.

‘Row 1. Seat 9.’ was written on the card. She pulled out the gun.²

(adapted from Meimberg 2011: 34; transl. LS)

Creeps, fear, anxiety, disgust – the notion of horror is associated with the evocation of negative emotions. Since “horror is both an everyday occurrence – terrorism, the cannibal next door, torture – and a way of dramatizing our hidden fears and desires through fantasy that takes the everyday that few steps further” (Wisker 2005: 1), this chapter illuminates the phenomenon of horror in reference to Carroll’s distinction between natural and art-horror (cf. Carroll 1990: 12). Natural horror describes real sources of dread and menace, and the emotions they trigger, whereas the concept of art-horror refers to the “cross-art, cross-media genre” (Carroll 1990: 12) and its effect on the recipient. Art-horror aims to simultaneously frighten and disgust the audience. It assumes a potential audience competence to decipher and experience the genre’s intentions and is less about the actual performance of the audience during the screening of individual films (cf. Carroll 1990: 30f.).

First, Chapter 1.1 recounts the historical development of art-horror including its intentions, protagonists, topoi, and central themes through major works of literature and film. Although art-horror rather serves as an umbrella term for a huge variety of instantiations, this chapter shows that semantic incongruities and oppositions are a unifying element of (all) its subgenres: The characters, objects, and narrative strategies of the horror genre combine opposing categories, such as life/death or healthy/sick, evoking the emotions of fear and disgust. Investigating art-horror through an incongruity perspective offers a way to grasp its underlying mechanisms and finally understand how it is processed cognitively. Thus, the genre overview demonstrates to what extent art-horror negotiates incongruity and how these incongruities evoke the emotions of fear and disgust. This oriented chapter thereby prepares the innovative, psycholinguistic analysis of the current book.

Second, Chapter 1.2 discusses explanations of (the origins of) the emotional effects that horror literature and film have on recipients (namely fear and disgust, but also pleasure) by consulting psychoanalytic and cognitive theories. The existing cognitive theories already suggest that incongruity plays a role in the evocation of art-horror emotions. However, they lack an experimentally verified systematization that also models cognitive processing phases. Thus, the research gap that this book seeks to close more precisely will be identified.

Third, displaying the intermediate results in Chapter 1.3 will help develop a working definition to be used in subsequent chapters and for the experimental design.

1.1 Origins and iconography of horror in literature and film

Most commonly, research on horror centers on, or at least explicitly engages with, the literary and cultural techniques used to evoke the emotional responses always at play in the horrific. Such forms of response have defined the horror genre since its inception and are now a well-documented field of research in literary studies. In extant research, the notion of horror usually describes a film and literature genre and its effects on the recipients. According to Leeder (2018), genres are conventions about content, formal and narrative features, and further aspects that reveal a text or film collection’s typicality (cf. Leeder 2018: 92). Within a genre, some representatives assemble numerous typical features and become central to the genre. Others only include some of the characteristic features and, thereby, range at the genre’s periphery (cf. Rosch 1973; Bordwell 1989: 148; Leeder 2018: 97). This chapter highlights typical horror genre content and its continuous development with examples from major literary and filmic works³ in order to investigate how horror evokes the emotions of fear and disgust. It will be shown that especially the negotiation of oppositions, incompatibilities and incongruities is responsible for the evocation of horror feelings. Investigating these incongruities provides an avenue for inferring underlying cognitive mechanisms needed to process art-horror and thereby prepares the later (psycho)linguistic analysis of the cognitive processing of horror. This serves as the basis for the review of theories of art-horror and, eventually, this book’s experimental approach to incongruity.

Gothic origins: Combining realistic with fantasy elements

Dark, evil and scary ideas have always been part of “sagas, tales by the fire, by the bedside, in the terrors of Beowulf, the ogres and monsters of myth and fairy stories, and the figure of Satan himself” (Wisker 2005: 39).⁴ But it was the horror (from Latin horror = shudder, frisson, dread, fright [cf. Stowasser, Petschenig and Skutsch 2009: 238]) of the Gothic fiction of 18^th and early 19^th century (cf. Alpers, Fuchs and Hahn 1999: 8; Hale 2002: 63; Viering 2010: 366) that “succeeded in shifting an entire paradigm” (Groom 2014: ix). It mobilized the effects of “manifestations of the Gothic past – buildings, ruins, songs and romances […]” (Botting 2014: 22) with mediaeval, “geographical features (the recess, […] rock […], black valley […]) and architectural features (priory, castle, abbey […])” (Miles 2002: 41). The combination of these realistic elements with fantasy events that threateningly penetrated the realistic elements of the novel through supernatural protagonists, like the undead, witches, and mystic symbols, stimulated the affective horror reactions of the recipients (cf. Seeßlen and Jung 2006: 60; Viering 2010: 366).

Landmark novels such as Shelley’s Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) or Lewis’ The Monk (1796) included monstrous beings as supernatural sources of fear, disgust, and threat. Furthermore, ghost tales, like de Maupassant’s Le Horla (1886), and vampire novels with blood sucking yet erotically seducing protagonists, like Stoker’s Dracula (1897), or works from Russian and French authors like Tolstoi’s Upyr (1841) were influential due to their sensual power and sexualization (cf. Brittnacher 1994: 318; Alpers, Fuchs and Hahn 1999: 11,14; Seeßlen and Jung 2006: 49f.).

Gradually, Gothic became a more general notion and henceforth was not only restricted to mediaeval contents but rather covered everything in prose, drama and lyrics that blurred “metaphysical, natural, religious, class, economic, marketing, generic, stylistic, and moral lines” (Hogle 2002: 8). Hoffmann (Die Elixiere des Teufels (1816), Der Sandmann (1817)), Poe (The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), The Raven (1845)), Lovecraft (Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927)), Le Fanu (Green Tea or Carmilla collected in In a Glass Darkly (1872)), Ewers (Der Zauberlehrling oder: die Teufelsjäger (1910)), and Meyrink (Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (1907)) gradually combined traditional elements of the Gothic with more realistic threats of mental illnesses (e.g. schizophrenia or mania) (cf. Alpers, Fuchs and Hahn 1999: 11), networks of intrigues (cf. Seeßlen and Jung 2006: 59), and the fear of the unknown, unconscious, uncanny (cf. Viering 2010: 367), thus adding to the affective power of the genre. The uncanny became the most important element of psychoanalytical horror theories (see Chapter 1.2.2).

Besides the uncanny and abject aspects of bodily horror, the figure of the mad scientist, from Shelley onwards, became a central trope of transgression and concomitant feelings of fear and disgust (for instance through the experiments in Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) or Well’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1898)): The mad scientist’s central function in the narrative structure was to broaden the skills of the human protagonists through drugs and operations so that the transformed humans became uncontrollable monsters or doppelgangers being able to exceed spatiotemporal limits (cf. Wisker 2005: 61–62).

Freud: Psychoanalysis enters the horror genre

Freud published his article Das Unheimliche in 1919 (see also Chapter 1.2.2) and thereby intensified the psychological trends in horror literature. Psychoanalysis allowed for readings that lumped together the monstrosity of human aggression, unconscious, infantile wishes, and psychological terror, such as in Asquith’s The Playfellow (1929), Collier’s Green Thoughts (1931), or Bloch’s Psycho (1959). It treated adverse animals, such as the gulls in Du Maurier’s The Birds (1952), and the body horror of “severed extremities, a severed head, a hand detached from the arm […]” (Freud 2012 [1919]: 266; transl. LS) under the headline of fear of castration’ and ‘projection’ (cf. Alpers, Fuchs and Hahn 1999: 20,23). Wisker (2005) emphasized how the events in The Birds psychologically and corporeally threatened normality, rationality, and security (cf. Wisker 2005: 84).

Modern horror: Humans threaten humans

Increasingly, the trope of the monster with its supernatural, exotic features gave way to dramatizations of the human condition, marked by deep desires and complex relationships with other humans, and became principal sources of fear, disgust, and pleasure during the 20^th century. The threat humans pose to other humans was for instance shown in novels with sexual topics, such as the submission of women and their final revenge or patriarchic, sadistic figures (cf. Wisker 2005: 96,98,102), for instance in Carter’s The Magic Toyshop (1967) or Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983). Wisker (2005) pointed out that such novels broke “established philosophical and cultural binary oppositions, that is, male/female, good/bad, day/night, normal/Other” (Wisker 2005: 98). Horror emphasized those oppositions but covered more than the male disempowering of the desired women. Women also became the “feared Other” (Wisker 2005: 98). These transgressions challenged given ethical standards, causing defensive reactions and disgust.

From Carrie (1974) and The Shining (1977) to Christine (1983) and The Green Mile (1997), Stephen King successfully contributed manifold horror novels, short ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Horror: How to scream because of incongruity
• 2 Humor: How to smile about incongruity
• 3 Humor & horror: Processing incongruity
• 4 Humor & horror: An experimental comparison
• 5 Discussion & conclusion
• Index