Lena Straßburger: Humor and Horror – Different Emotions, Similar Linguistic Processing Strategies

The film Beau is afraid (Aster 2023) left audiences (and many critics) shocked and confused, with the director himself describing his film as “anxiety comedy”, inspired by Greek plays and Kafka-esque paranoia (Kermode 2023). Indeed, Aster, previously known for outright “elevated horror”, such as Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019), employs a variety of narrative and aesthetic tropes of horror cinema to convey the grotesquely funny and, indeed scary, journey of his main protagonist Beau; including a dystopian urban landscape populated with violent madmen, poisonous spiders, claustrophobia, paranoia, and trauma. And a giant talking penis in the attic. Obviously, hybrids of humor and horror are not a recent phenomenon in artistic expression. They are visible in varied works, across styles and genres, such as the German proto satire of HJ Grimmelshausen’s novel Simplicius Simplicissimus, the cartoon strips of Gary Larsson, the paintings of Jewish visual artist Rosabel Rosalind, as well as the films of Quentin Tarantino.

What is at play in Aster’s film, leans heavily on the interplay of comedic structure and horror tropes utilizing a double incongruity approach, which Lena Straßburger has identified previously, for instance, in her study on violent clowns (2019). A similar approach, embedded in a systematic investigation of the transferability of humor theories to the socio-psychological and linguistic processing mechanisms of horror, is now the subject of her reworked PhD thesis in the shape of this exhaustive study.

The oscillating relationship between horror and humor has been previously explored, perhaps most prominently and interdisciplinary, in the research of Carroll (1990, 1995, 1999, 2003, 2004, analyzing the cause and effect of incongruity in both contexts. Carroll is mostly interested in the ethics and aesthetics of what he calls “the paradox of horror” (1999) and pays less attention to the more specific interrelations of both phenomena’s inherent incongruities. Lena Straßburger closes this gap with this thorough and original contribution, successfully building and expanding on previous research in incongruity humor studies.

So far, psycholinguistic humor experiments have not compared a humorous incongruity to a frightening incongruity and less attention has been paid to the complicated interrelationship of humor and horror and their results. The main strength of this book is therefore that it successfully bridges the fields of humor and horror research by transferring the former’s incongruity detection, resolution and emotional elaboration to the latter. As such, it identifies similar ways of cognitive processing and introduces an analogous art-horror analysis enabling scholars and practitioners of both contexts a deeper understanding of their respective phenomena.

In the books’ introduction, the conceptual and experimental approach is succinctly laid out by framing the study with its initial research questions:

1. Does art-horror evoke the same kind of incongruity as humor?

2. Does art-horror elicit additional processing costs compared to (in)coherent items?

3. How do the cognitive processing costs of art-horror differ from those of humorous, incongruent items, with respect to intensity and time-course of the observed costs?

4. Are these processing costs associated with the local incongruity of the stimulus? Can they be correlated with incongruity detection and resolution?

5. Do the recipients react emotionally after incongruity detection and resolution?

By employing this particular line of investigation and research design, the book points to the necessity of a more precise cognitive incongruity model that can be employed to explain humor and art-horror based on the predictiveness of processing stages and the verification of empirical data.

Chapter 1 explores art-horror as both genre and discourse by introducing a variety of psychoanalytic and cognitive art-horror theories and by categorizing art-horror into a cluster of sub genres and tropes, such as gothic origins, the uncanny, the psychological turn of horror after Freud, and the human turn in contemporary horror, “laying bare the suffering and doubt of the flesh” (Wisker 2005: 118). Here, relevant works of horror fiction in literature and film are referenced, including the works of Stephen King, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), Guy de Maupassant’s Le Horla (1908), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), as well as the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski, or William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975). There are fewer or no references to more contemporary works of horror fiction, in particular the increasing plethora of books and films characterized by socio-cultural and so-called elevated horror from the 2010s onwards. However, the author is less interested in the specific iconography, themes, or authorial tropes of art-horror, and more in its underlying psycho-linguistic patterns and processes of reception. The chapter pays particular attention to contrasts, or oppositions, such as real/unreal, normal/abnormal, alive/dead, good/evil and own/foreign as triggers of fear and disgust, or fundaments of fear (Seeßlen and Jung 2006). In essence, art-horror is characterized by a psycholinguistic approach which utilizes semantic incongruities to evoke emotions of fear and disgusts in recipients.

Prefacing the book with an introduction to and contextualization of art-horror smartly addresses an academic necessity and establishes the thematic dramaturgy of this study, particularly, since the intricacies of the horror genre and its incongruities might be less familiar to many humor researchers.

Chapter 2 examines the question of how the phenomena of art-horror and humor, despite causing fundamentally different emotional reactions, based on broadly opposite affects, still can be based on the same stimulus showing similar underlying cognitive mechanisms. The chapter proceeds by, first, giving a (historical) overview of mostly social and psychoanalytical humor theories, before addressing the (rhetorical) question of the chapters’ framing: how to smile about incongruity? Here, the author introduces cognitive approaches to humor research by working through the most established incongruity theories and models of humor, including Koestler’s model of bisociation (1966), Suls´ Two-Stage Model (1972), Minsky’s framework for representing stereotyped situations (1974) and Raskin’s Semantic Script Theory of Humor (1985). The chapter then transfers these approaches and synchronizes the conceptual findings with an analogous art-horror analysis. By doing so, it convincingly establishes a foundation for an experimental comparison of the identification and comprehension of art-horror and humor laid out in the two following chapters.

Firstly, chapter 3, introduces experiments addressing language comprehension in humor via reaction times or electrophysiological reactions and neuronal correlates of incongruity processing. Secondly, it determines three processing phases comprising the detection of humorous incongruity, its resolution, and a subsequent emotional reaction.

Building on these experimental findings and methodological merits, chapter 4, then expands on humor specific experiments by attesting that art-horror incongruity is analogously cognitively processed, resolved and elaborated. To further assess and support this claim, the chapter thoroughly discusses and reports three experiments exploring the influence of positive and negative emotions on both art-horror and humor reception, focusing on factors such as reading times, facial expressions and neuro-electric activity.

Finally, chapter 5, reflects, discusses and summarizes the insights gained, identifying incongruity as a fundamental conceptional mechanism in the recognition, script-switching and processing in both contexts of art-horror and humor. Based on these findings, the author develops and suggests a (shared) model of incongruity processing for humor and art-horror (IPM).

In sum, the originality and meticulousness the author exhibits in the extrapolation of incongruity as a common denominator and decisive trigger for the reception of both art-horror and humor must be applauded and can be considered a major contribution to the field of incongruity research. Furthermore, by identifying, aligning, and testing the transferability of incongruity theories of humor to the contexts of art horror, including modes of receptions, this book contributes fundamentally to the necessary task of clarifying terminologies across the interdisciplinary field(s) of humor research, as well enlightening genre studies of horror. As such, this study is beneficial for academic researchers and practitioners alike.

However, as the author herself admits by stating that “[this] book deduces a rather broad concept of art-horror” (Straßburger 2022: 191), it does not go unnoticed how she speaks with greater authority to the trajectories and mechanisms of cognitive humor theory than to the context of art-horror as an equally refined notion. Indeed, the conceptualization of art-horror as “genre” and humor as “phenomenon” causes a variety of epistemological and methodological problems the study not always addresses successfully. For instance, it would have been a welcome addition to both the methodological design of the experiments as well as the study’s overall conclusion to consider to what extent our societal expectations towards comedy and horror as genres factor in on an overall assessment of both phenomena and their respective incongruities. Consequently, possible arising ethical challenges might generate further processing costs in negotiating and reconciling humorous and frightening incongruities – for artists working at the intersections of humor and horror, for humor and horror researchers exploring both notions, and for audiences who might experience genre-blending and the oscillation between comedic and horror tropes as a limitation of their enjoyment and pleasure.

However, these objections aside, given this book’s specific psycholinguistic focus, Lena Straßburger’s exhaustive and innovative study, based on detailed experimental findings and discussions of a broad variety of cognitive theories and models, not only proposes a detailed and fascinating comparison of humor and art-horror processing by identifying incongruity as their central, decisive denominator. Furthermore, this book offers valuable insights for psycholinguistic humor research by refining and contextualizing approaches to cognitive humor studies and successfully incorporating art-horror as part of a similar and shared cognitive processing model. Equally, Straßburger’s suggested incongruity processing model of humor and horror (IPM) would also be able to explain the genre-blending effects utilized in the aforementioned film Beau is Afraid, including the giant talking penis in the attic.