Jokes and Their Relation to the Uncanny: The Comic, the Horrific, and Pleasure in Audition and Romero's Dead Films
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores relationship between Freud's theories of comic and horrific, as presented in Jokes and their Relation to Unconscious and The Uncanny. Freudian interpretation of horror films and literature generally involves notion of and return of repressed. However, there are striking similarities in processes that lie behind production of pleasure in comic and horrific as Freud described them, and so we must consider this close relationship in a theory of effects of horror. Melanie Klein's work on sadism and masochism is used to present a potential explanation of why horror is pleasurable: just as form of joke gives us pleasure by overcoming resistance and thus liberating psychic energy, horror film also produces pleasure by tapping into sadism and masochism, liberating psychic energy that was used for inhibition of instincts. keywords: Freud, jokes, uncanny, horror, Romero, Miike, Klein url: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2006_ledrew01.shtml At a recent screening of Three Extremes (an anthology of short horror films by three Asian directors) at Toronto's Bloor Cinema, I was somewhat perplexed when, upon discovering that secret ingredient in dumplings a character was eating to achieve eternal youth was aborted foetuses, audience erupted in laughter. At a later point in this short (Dumplings, by Chinese director Fruit Chan), we actually see an abortion performed, and later bloody foetus sitting on a plate before being chopped up by Aunt Mei to put in her dumplings, again provoking laughter along with groans of revulsion. The end of this short, featuring main character munching happily on dumplings containing chopped up bits of her own aborted foetus, brought more laughter and even a round of applause from audience. How is it that something so horrific, so disgusting, so abject (not to mention so incredibly politically incorrect and, one would assume, offensive to many), provokes such a response? The fine line between what is horrific and what is comic has rarely been explored in psychoanalytic approaches to film studies. Horror and laughter, while seemingly on opposite sides of emotional spectrum, are often brought together in films. The term has been used to refer to this sub-genre, but comic element is often very subtle. Many film critics (notably Leonard Maltin) have referred to masterpiece of horror and suspense, Psycho, as a black comedy - even Hitchcock himself described it as such. Similarly, David Lynch's surrealist nightmare Eraserhead exudes a dark sense of humour, and could be classified as horror or black comedy, depending on who you ask. Camera, a Toronto independent and repertory house, features a weekly Camera After Midnight event, screening cult European horror films. Here gasps of shock and horror are often followed by laughter, clapping and cheering; sometimes these responses occur simultaneously. Freud's notion of the uncanny is highly influential in horror film interpretation, but little attention has been paid to fact that his theory of horrific bears striking resemblances to his theory of comic in Jokes and Their Relation to Unconscious. It is these similarities that I wish to address in a discussion of effects and appeal of horror films, including those that achieve comic effects intentionally and unintentionally. Understanding relationship between jokes and uncanny, and psychic mechanisms behind them, is key to understanding effects and appeal of horror. This is because psychical processes and mechanisms of pleasure are so similar that there is a fine line between what might be experienced as comic and what might be experienced as horrific. These are psychical responses to texts and stimuli that address unconscious in similar ways. Freud's work on subject serves as basis of this discussion, though I will also refer to Melanie Klein's work on sadism and masochism as a potential means to enriching our understanding of relationship between comic and horrific. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".