Mixing humour with horror in fiction
I got into trouble last year for submitting an assignment (Masters in Creative Writing) that included a story that sprinkled elements of humour (think Despicable Me) into a gritty and frankly disturbing tale of a homeless man swapping bodies/minds with a teenage girl (think Freaky Friday spiked with A Clockwork Orange).
The dismissal of my experiment still rankles; I think mostly because I didn't get an explanation I could use to progress my writing.
Under what circumstances would it be acceptable to mix humour with something approaching horror? If possible, can you give examples of novels/screenplays in which this has worked?
PS I looked at Is blending genres well received by readers? and found some good general advice about blending genres, but nothing that addresses the specific bleed style I am looking at. Similarly, Writing Across Multiple Genres is more about authors crossing genres rather than mixing them, as is Writing different genres.
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2 answers
Horror works on building tension. Humour breaks it. On the face of it, you've got two cardinally opposed directions here. How do you mix the two?
First, there's gallows humour. Gallows humour doesn't undermine the dark tone of the situation. If anything - it drives it home. At the same time, there's strength in being able to laugh at a hard situation, which is why people resort to it.
You can use the notion of gallows humour, and take it one step further, turning your whole story into dark comedy. Such a work, I think, would be at least a little surreal - the sharp juxtaposition of funny and horrifying becoming the reality in which you write.
As a final, brilliant example, I would point you towards Roberto Benigni's film La Vita è Bella. It is a comedy. About a Jewish family in a concentration camp. It is funny and chilling at the same time, and there's more heart in it than in any Holocaust movie I can think of. Where Schindler's List and The Pianist leave me somewhat overloaded, La Vita è Bella invariably makes me cry - it's softer tome penetrates deeper.
How does Benigni do it? Gallows humour is self-aware: both the person telling the joke, and the person hearing it are aware of the horror. As such, it is usually cynical. Benigni avoids this cynicism entirely, instead presenting us with a father who tries to hide the meaning of what's going on from his child. The tension, the danger - it's always there. And in the face of it, there's the father being a clown. And each time you laugh, you also know he's just put himself and the child in that much more danger - you don't get to laugh at the Nazis. So, you have the humorous situation building tension, instead of breaking it like it usually does.
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The problem is that you are mixing two fundamentally different genres. If I want to read a funny story I am not in the mood for horror - I want jokes and the problem of not laughing out while on the bus. If I am reading horror I don't want all the suspense to be resolved by some joke that leaves me hanging in regards to finding out who the murderer/monster/... is.
I can give some advice from a gaming perspective. When playing an RPG in a horror setting you have to be careful about not having only horror. It becomes dull and less interesting very fast. You know there will be a blood bath around the next corner. You know there will be someone or something munching on someone. You know there will be another murder victim when the telephone rings. That's why you are trying to lossening the tension by using a few jokes every now and then. The horror becomes more horrific when you can contrast it with the normality and safety of an environment that allows jokes and funny scenes.
It's the same as if you are portraying your charcters as having a good life before "the incident" or something similar. The higher they are in the beginning, the deeper they can fall.
And by making it look like they can make it back to the top again you are giving them hope - only to crush it again in a horrific way. It's not a constant way down. It's the ups and downs that are interesting.
But you are doing this in relatively safe circumstances for the characters. When the group is at home during the day for example. Everything's bright, there is no time pressure, they have some room to breath. Now is the time for someone to lighten up the mood a bit with a joke here and there.
But when night comes around and your characters are being chased by the crazy psychopaths you need concentration and attention - something funny distracts, doesn't fit the current situation and is overall more of nuisance than a welcome diversion.
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