I think all of us interact with the world with a mixture of fear and avarice. There are things we hope for and things we fear. The frog video is funny because first we feel superior to the frog, who has been tricked. It appeals to your sense of superiority. Then you realize that is kind of mean to the frog, then the person doing the trick gets attacked, which is poetic justice which is completely unexpected. Surprise is a key element in humor; it disrupts a pattern. If we posit that the information content of a message is an inverse of its predictability–the more predictable, the less information–then humor almost by definition contains information, which is to say new pattern arrangements.
Now tragedy, too, involves the descent into murder and chaos from existing orders. It alters the big picture. Someone dies, or takes their eyes out. Comedy happens within an intact field. Cheers would not have been funny if Sam had been murdered by a cuckolded husband, or Norm died of cirrhosis.
You CAN use humor to form new patterns. This is true. Cops and ER doctors and paramedics are notorious for gallows humor. I remember one case where a motorcyclist lost his leg in an accident. The cops I knew cleared the scene, then fifteen minutes were wondering how “Pegleg Pete” was doing. That’s how you cope: you take what is in some respects an actually tragic image and convert it to one amenable to humor. In my view, this is healthy, even necessary, even if the public would be scandalized to hear what goes on behind the scenes.
But contemplating this morning, it occurred to me that the Horror genre is tragedy without redemption–without the possibility of learning, where even when the “protagonist” (were Freddy Krueger’s victims really protagonists? Hannibal Lector? Jigsaw?) somehow through great courage survives, it means nothing, the violence happened for nothing; and overt sadism is comedy without pattern formation. Sadists laugh at their victims, or at least they can. What are they laughing at? Nothing.
Power creates one thing: a relationship without other content between oppressor and oppressed. All meaning inheres in this relationship, and for the oppressor at least, life is empty without that relationship, although they often enough find masochistic counterparts.
Why the laughter though? Examples come easily to mind, but simply imagine the evil cackle that Mike Myers made fun of with the Dr. Evil character.
Logically, I suppose, and I am thinking as I type, if the point of humor is altered patterns within the mind of the perceiver, then a power relation is “funny” to the extent that it represents a fall from “sobriety” on the part of the victim, of a stable world with social norms which are about to be broken. This break is a quantitative one, in that it represents not an alteration in a cognitive gestalt, but an outright break in conditions of life.
I think the foregoing is correct. I will say in concluding here simply that I cannot see in the Horror genre anything but a de facto giving up on finding a deeper meaning in life than living a dull life punctuated by the occasional excitement of the sort watching other people suffer occasions. Add to that regular pornography, the possibility of good sex, and maybe a lottery win, and that’s it.
Our culture, presently, is a very weak one. And to make a final final point, walking backwards is not a possibility. We cannot return to anything. We must move forward to something new. That is the underlying thesis of the Goodness Movement website. One day soon I am going to try to form a “church”, but one not quite like anything I’ve ever heard of. I need to get my own shit straight first, and am making progress on that score.