Description
From 1920’s “Haunted Spooks” to “Zombieland,” the genre of horror-comedy has never really, you should excuse the expression, died. Yet humor and horror seem pretty different; one’s a pie in the face, the other’s an axe in the skull. It’s obvious why watching someone being torn asunder would be horrible but why is the endless suffering of the Three Stooges funny? Could there be congruences between funny and fear, snickers and screams, gore and gags, slapstick and slaughter?
Yes.
This multimedia talk proposes – carefully, while remaining alert and well-armed –that the two genres are not mortal enemies. Using examples ranging from Freud & Kant to Abbott & Costello, David Misch explores how horror and humor share a mordant view of our relationship to pain; an obsession with the human body and its multifarious fluids; and a subtext of death and transcendence underlying the eviscerated flesh and vomit gags.
