Sam Box

An Axe to the Funny Bone: Curated Instability and Horror-Comedy Intersections in American Storytelling

Funny. Terrifying. Subversive. Horror-Comedy twists and bites at the intersection of two incredibly reactive genres—with both horror and comedy being well known for the political and social discourses they embody and reinvent through story. While prevalent in American popular culture, scholarly analysis of this hybrid space barely exists beyond a small number of Film Studies investigations. Despite this lack, Horror-Comedy works continue to be successfully produced. This thesis unpacks the vibrant relationship between fear and laughter in contemporary American storytelling through Horror-Comedy, maintaining a focus on structural dynamics and the audience-disarming results of simultaneously applying horror and humor to a subject. As an analytical framework to understand these particular narrative impacts across mediums and subjects, I argue for curated instability: a powerful destabilization of audiences’ predictions through the apparent genre paradox embedded in Horror-Comedy works. Examining the roots and evidence of this theory, I unpack complex systems of subversions across film, adolescent legend and ritual, circus routine, literature, and more. In the weaving of this expansive and unorthodox web, a socially generative instinct for testing reality through story shines through the dark and colorful spaces where horror and comedy meet, creating rich potentials for civic power and new ways of thinking.

Haunted attractions and immersive scares often provoke laughter and comic play. How do we create spaces for joyous and subversive interactions with iconographies that scare us? 

What does the appearance or suggestion of danger represent in humorous performance environments?