Laughing During Horror Movies

can really double down on your stuff. And hey, the three of us would love to meet you. This is the opportunity to do it. Learn more and buy your tickets at New York Comic Con dot com. Slash n y c C hyphen presents Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Seger, and hey, we've both just saw the movie It in the movie theater. And this is rare because you don't get to the movies as

much as I do. But we have both been able to see a movie in the theater and experience it pretty recently. Yeah, and I mean a lot of people are checking it out. Yeah, it's it's become quite a hit. So when I was at the movies watching this, there was this woman in the theater who is in the back a couple of rows from me, and she just kept screaming every time Pennywise would show up, like this

howling scream, and this caused her. Then she would laugh in response to her own screaming, and everyone else in the theater then would laugh as well. So there's this like weird moment where like everybody was laughing over this movie of this just horrible depictions. Then I saw that movie Mother a week later. Yeah, yeah, and that didn't happen at all. No one laughed, No, there was no nervous laughter, there was no screaming. It was just this unrelenting, traumatic,

uncomfortable horror playing out in front of you. And so I'm wondering, is there some kind of metric of successful horror here or is it just like different subgenres when people feel like it's okay to laugh nervously versus they're just enraptured with with what is so scary in front of them. Well, yeah, and then of course these are two very different films. I understand with with kind of different target audiences, so when I very much account but yeah, I I share some of your concerns about my my

fellow viewers. I mean, this is a reason I one of the reasons I don't go to movie theaters that much, because ultimately I would rather watch anything in my living room. Um, it's only the whole timing aspect of of like a film you're really excited about. It's going to get me to go to the theater because otherwise I'm not crazy about the theater. It's you know, it tends to be overpriced. You gotta go if you if you're gonna if I go in my and I go with my wife, then

I have we have to get a sitter. It's just the whole whole pain and uh. And you know, life moves so fast now at our age that it's like a movie. Like when you're a kid, if you didn't see Batman in the theater, it's like forever in the future. It's like two months, yeah, and two months like that's gone like that, like movie after movie, I'm like, oh, that Marvel film seems kind of kind of cool. Maybe I'll check that out. And then it's on, you know,

direct streaming. But of the many things that bother me about the the movie theater going experience, there's certainly the the audience reaction to not only scares, but to just graphic violence in general. You're you're watching it, you're immersed. Something scarier violent happens and someone responds with laughter. It throws me out of the experience of watching the film. But then I also have this weird moment where I'm like, what are we as a species? Who? Where? What have

we done culturally so wrong? How do what is our relationship with depictions of violence in our in our fiction that that will that allows this to happen, That I'm hearing somebody cackle while someone's being like bludgeoned to death or something. Well, I have to admit, Robert, I'm probably one of the people that would annoy you in that respect, because during it there were points where I giggled gleefully.

But I think when I think back on it, it was more out of the sheer excitement that as a horror fan they were able to make a film that was actually as dark and horrifying as the novel, And I was so I thought I was going to be disappointed going into it. And you know this, horror fans were like junkies, were always on the lookout for the next good story that's going to come out in the genre. Right. We're just always hoping, will this be it? Will this be the next cool thing? And more often than not,

we're disappointed. So I think when I was giggling, it was more out of happiness that this thing wasn't failing my expectations, you know. And I've been getting a lot of questions about what you're talking about in relation to the movie it because it's been so popular. A lot of people are saying to me, because they know that I write horror and that I'm a fan of horror, what is it that you like about horror? What you know?

They say it to me as if like I'm a damaged human being and they need me to explain you know that I'm not, uh, And I guess for me, I see storytelling as a way of learning through the surrogate figures that are playing out in the story in front of you, right, And this is essentially our method

for explaining to each other how the world works. So cautionary tales like horror seem to me to be culture designed to enhance our survival rate, and something like it is a glimpse is something that's larger than us, because obviously it's not a real clown running around and murdering people.

It's some kind of monstrous, cosmic entity. Yeah, so you've got this whole idea that there's something beyond our understanding and something that scares us by simply showing us that we are just not as significant as we like to think we are. And there's something oddly zen about that that I like when you learn to be content with your lack of significance and you just can accept that you don't understand everything and you never will. And I think there's room for laughter there as well. Yeah, I

would agree with with that. You know, I I write horror as well, and I don't think of myself as a as a horror writer per se. Like, I think it's more a matter of exploring the reel through the unreal. And if you were exploring something that is inherently dark or inherently fantastic, inherently ridiculous or surreal, I mean that's going to color your unreal method of exploring it. But yeah, I think it's more about it's it's more about what that that that endpoint, like, what are you trying to

explore about the real world? Right? So then let's back up for a second here, because we're both practitioners and fans of this, but there's something going on here with the human experience when people are laughing at horror movies. So let's try to unpack this and look at the history, biology,

and psychology of laughter. Yeah, because I think the main issue here is that you can either say I'm the only person in this theater who's sane and everyone else is having an insane or a logical reaction to the horror. That's one way to approach it. But the more likely explanation is that what is happening here is normal, and if we look at it, it'll reveal something about our relationship to humor, our relationship to horror, and just the

human experience itself. All right, So let's let's start with just laughter and humor in general. So studies have shown that various apes, rats, dogs, birds, dolphins, they all do something that resembles laughter. But of course everything is a little bit more complicated with humans, and laughter itself is complicated. You know what, when you hear it, it's that mix

of rhythmic vocalized, you know, involuntary actions. It begins with a set of gestures, a crack in the facial features, and then the emergence of sound, and that exact sound

is gonna gonna very tremendous. I mean, you've you've all heard countless versions of laughter, you know, like the deep resonating laughter of say Brian blessed Um, who played, of course, of the character Vulcan and the flash Gordon, the tittering laughter of say the character Knox Harrington, or David Thulis played by David Threwis in The Big Lebowski, or you know, any example of sardonic laughter or sexy laughter. I mean,

the list goes on and on. But when we we belt out a hearty laugh, we we feel it throughout the body. Uh, even the arm, leg, and trunk muscles, fifteen facial muscles contract and we feel the unmistakable stimulation of the zygomatic muscle, the main lifting mechanism of your upper lip. Meanwhile, the epiglottis partially closes the laarnix, interfering with respiratory system, making air and take ir regular you gasp. In extreme situations, you even have your your tear ducks

kicking in and contributing tears um as well. Maybe your your nose is running. It becomes this. We often forget that, like a really true full body laugh. It's like being gassed with something. In extreme situations, you pee your pants. Yeah, it happens now. Of course, for you to laugh, you need some sort of stimuli, and the most common stimuli is, of course, humor. But humor itself is a tricky subject to understand that we've been we've been banging our heads

against it for thousands of years. So I thought it might be helpful to just go ahead and roll through a few basic theories regarding a humor so that we can move forward. And I think as we go we'll find that in trying to um explain what humor is and how we react to humor, we also get into that area of horror. Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Hobbs, they all argued the superiority theory of humor, which states that we

simply find the misfortune of others amusing. Yeah, this is schadenfreud, of the great German term for finding pleasure in somebody else's misfortune. Yeah, and he view. You see someone trip and you laugh, or you trip and someone laughs at you. This seems like a perfectly solid explanation for everything that's occurring. Now. Meanwhile, Sigmund Freud, he championed the champion the relief theory, which states the comedy is a way for people to release

suppress thoughts and emotions safely. And this can include everything from you know, cutting a slice of you know, confert you know, controversial say social commentary, or are just a simple fart joke. Now. Emmanuel Conta Flip favored the incongruity theory, which suggests that humor blooms when people notice the disconnect between their expectations and the actual payoff. I went in to smell that flour on your lapel and it squirted water.

That was unexpected. That was hilarious. Now. One that one of the more recent theories that that I find quite attractive is the benign violation theory, and this holds that humor arises when benign subject matter and violent or dangerous subject matter overlapped, overlap and allow and the laugh itself is a way to communicate to others that a previously perceived threat is not a real danger. Now, none of

this is a subtled debate. You can argue for any one of these, and maybe there's a little truth in all of them, but especially for our purposes here, I do really like the benign violation theory because it explains humor and laughter in terms of communication. After all, we are social organisms. I mean, we we banned together. That's where we found our survival in a in a dangerous

world of limited resources. So it makes sense that allowed vocal expression, not only a vocal expression, but a very physical expression is we've described, would have some sort of a communicative role. So when we drilled down even further, we look to the work of a guy named Robert Provine.

He's a neuroscientist and psychology professor at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County, and he conducted laughter research for this book that he wrote, and he observed real world laughter in more than a thousand episodes in public places. And Provine described his approach as trying to understand laughter from the position of a visiting extraterrestrial. So essentially, what would an alien make of the sounds and faces we're

making when we're laughing. So he first defined what a laugh is, and he quantified it as a series of short vowel like notes or syllables that are each seventy five milliseconds long and are repeated at regular intervals about two hundred and ten milliseconds apart. Now, there's no specific vowel sound that defines laughter, but similar vowel sounds are typically used for the notes of a given laugh. Right, So we're not going uh oh e I, you know,

like you're not combining all the various different vowels. Is usually the same one over and over again. So there's usually a strong harmonic structure to laughter, with each being a multip full of a low frequency. So when you look at laughter's harmonic structure on a sound spectrogram, you actually find that there are evenly space stacks of short horizontal lines in the spectrum, and the notes and the inter note intervals between them, those carry the actual information

that helps us identify a sound as laughter. So, for instance, if you were to use like editing software and you cut out the spaces between laugh notes, you would still recognize it as laughter. But if you cut out the notes themselves, it just sounds like a long, breathy sigh. Essentially, all human laughter is a variation on this basic form, and we typically start seeing it in babies around three and a half to four months of age. And Provide

also found the following stats. He found that less than twenty of the laughter incidents he cataloged were in response to something that was actually funny. Instead, people more often are giggling or chuckling at innocuous statements like, for instance, I see your point and then somebody goes And what's even more interesting is that the person who produced the laugh provoking statement was forty six percent more likely to

be the one who chuckled themselves. So it's more likely that people tell a joke and then they laugh at themselves, then somebody else laughs at them. In only eight of the one thousand, two hundred recorded episodes that Provine looked at did they find that laughter interrupted what someone was saying. Nine point nine percent of the time, laughter occurs in these tidy, natural breaks. And this is weird because I think I'm probably the point zero one percent of the population.

Then who laughs in ways that totally interrupted conversation? Anybody who's listening to me on these podcasts will probably attest to that. Also, I'm the most awkward person to go to the movies with because I laugh a lot inappropriately. I got dirty looks in the theater for laughing maniacally at movies like American Psycho and Hannibal. Well, I mean American Psycho. In Hannibal, you do have to admit that they play with black comedy a little bit. That's what

I thought. Yeah, as I was watching them, I was like, oh, this is supposed to be dark humor. I was laughing in response to it, and people were looking at me like I was a madman, Like you're laughing at this naked man running down the hall with a chainsaw. But that scene is legitimately hilarious because they're going to such

pains to hide as genitalia. Because and that made an otherwise terrifying, otherwise terrifying scene, uh, comedic because they're because of what they're clearly doing from a blocking standpoint, there's a lot that's silly about that scene started on un Hannibal. There's a lot selling that as well. Now as far as laughter interrupting conversation, uh, and and even with yourself, you know, I I tend not to interpret people's laughter

in conversation as an interruption. Maybe it's I kind of think of it in the same way that you generally wouldn't say that applause interrupts a performance, you know. Um it just it seems like we if you're engaging with the conversation with somebody and there's laughter happening on one or both sides, that that is factoring into the communication, right, unless it's just occurring with you know, in a state

of madness. Yeah, exactly, That's how I see it. So for instance, I think the stats actually back this up too, and this is why I tend to laugh the way I do. But uh, probably more unconsciously than conscious. Indicates that most people use laughter in the same way we use verbal pauses. And what I mean by that is, rather than quietly wait to respond while we're collecting our thoughts, we're using the stilted laughter to hold our place in

the conversation. It's the same thing is when people use like or you know, as verbal pauses in a in a sentence that they're saying out loud so that they can kind of compose themselves first. And as podcasters, we have to admit not only do we do this like every human who communicates in any language does, because this is just a natural part of human communication. But boy, do we get a lot of messages about it. I don't know. I haven't really noticed any messages about it recently.

Maybe not recently. Yeah, maybe it's because we've been doing the show for a long time. I remember when I first came on Stuff to Blow your Mind, I got a lot of notes about it. Well, there is an exercise in sort of, you know, cutting down one's use of those words. But also I think people that was into this show and certain other shows like this realize that it is, for the most part, an organic conversation. Yeah. Granted, it's not the same as a full blown conversation. It's

kind of a performance conversation with notes on hand. It would be a very weird conversation if you were having if you were trying to talk to somebody and they were referring to note cards the whole time. But we're

also were not scripted show. And if you have if it's scripted, then yeah you can you can cut out all of those likes and yeah, exactly, And I think there's different expectations of what people think we might be doing on this show, right, Like some people think that everything is completely scripted and that we're just reading the whole time to each other, and then other people think that it's totally extemporaneous and we have all of these facts in our head and it's just spouting them off

back and forth to each other. Really it's a mix of the two. So provide back to his research. He proved essentially that laughter is inherently social and it's a tool of communication, and it's not always or often actually in relation to something that's supposed to be funny. He found that participants were actually thirty times more likely to laugh in the presence of others than they were when they were a quote, truly alone. What he meant by this is not counting in response to TV shows or

other media. So when we're totally alone, apparently we seem to hardly laugh at all. Yeah, I did it. Certainly mag is up with my experience of watching comedies, Like I really don't like watching comedies by myself, because there's there's very little joy to be had trying to laugh or or never inevitably setting there not laughing while something

humorous takes place. Yeah. I think maybe this is why I surround myself with animals, because even if my wife isn't home, I spend half my day talking to them and laughing at them or like having like little interactions with them. And they're just like, dude, we don't understand English. You know, they understand laughter probably, but not necessarily whatever I'm saying to them. You know, I just and weirdly

inherently communicative in that way. I think if I was by myself and just laughing and talking to myself, it would feel stranger to me. I mean, that's the ultimate beauty of having any kind of pet around. Is it gives us license to sit around and talk to ourselves. Oh? Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. Uh So it's also worth noting, just broadly about this, that social scientists have confirmed too that laugh tracks on television show those actually do increase audience laughter, and not

only that, they increase people's rating of comedic materials. So we have yet another social aspect that's going on here with laughter. I really do not like the idea that science is backing up the laugh track tracks. Yeah, it's true. We have an entire brain Stuff video episode all about uh, laugh tracks in the history of them that Joe actually worked on and it's a it's really good. Oh cool. We'll have to throw a link to that on a landing page for this episode at stuff to Blow your

Mind dot com. And we should consider getting a laugh track for this, uh show. That's a great idea. Yeah, I know the listeners would hate. Are there any podcasts out there with laugh tracks? Surely there must be, Huh that would be interesting. Cereal's got to have a laugh track, right, Okay. So there's also an evolutionary theory that's related to the whole laughter thing and it was proposed in two thousand five and the Quarterly Review of Biology, and this was

by Matthew Gervas and his advisor David Sloan Wilson. Basically, they looked at the research of this nineteen century French physician named Guillaume Duchane. He was this guy this is the electrocution of the fac Yes, so he would go around and zap people's faces with this little electronic mischief box. Well, he wouldn't just go around and do it. It was like a psychopath. No, he wasn't just going up to

strangers and doing it. Sorry, Yeah, he was doing it too too willing volunteers in a hospital, but he wanted to see what would happen, and the volts evoked a certain kind of smiling. Uh. And this is what Robert was referring to earlier. This is where the zygomatic major muscles get raised along the corners of our mouths. Right. But he could never get the mischief box to reproduce the kind of laugh or smile we get when we

actually find something truly funny. This laugh is way more complex, and yeah, it uses the zygomatic major muscles, but it also uses the obicularis oculi muscles, and those are the muscles that are around our eyes that form crow's feet. This is why you hear that phrase A real smile is in your eyes. The first smile, the one that's just with your mouth. That's just what we do to be polite. I call it a dead smile. And it's unfortunately what I usually end up producing when I'm asked

to smile for a camera. Right, So, like anytime I'm whatever, like somebody wants to take a picture, I had the hardest time genuinely smiling, and there's always like somebody on the other end. It's just like, oh, why can't you just smile? What is what are you doing? You know that kind of thing, And it's because I'm conscious of the dead smile. Look, yeah, I mean it's just a classic griff and grim smile where someone just says, hey,

smile for the photo, take the picture. Whereas you know, an actual professional photographer is going to try and get a legitimate, you know, emotional response from you and they're taking a picture. That's difficult. Your wife's a photographer. That must be a huge part of the job, and I can't imagine it's easy. No, it's it's always a challenge because you're all ways dealing with a different person with it.

And some people are going to be natural laughers. They're you know, they're gonna they're gonna naturally let that that inner portion of themselves out. Other people are gonna be more closed off and they're gonna give you that dead smile and you've got to sort of all but carve it out of their face. So Jervas and Wilson they positive that two to four million years ago we human beings evolved into having what they're referring to as do shame laughter. This is when we actually find something funny.

But why did we do it well? The idea is that it was a signal that everything was okay and that our danger was low and our needs were met. That lines up with the benign violation theory exactly. But then sometime since then, the dead smile laughter emerged as we became more cognitively developed. Now, the idea here is that we learned to mimic the spontaneity of laughter so that we can try to take advantage of its effects and manipulate other people into thinking everything was okay when

it isn't. This is like the little finger form of laughing. This is why your boss thinks that that every joke they've ever told is hilarious. So true, so true. This is absolutely that. Yeah, I immediately thought of bosses in the past. Yes. Uh. But no matter how hard we try, we usually can't get it right because of the whole eyes thing. So there's another neuroscientist that backs us up. His name's V. S. Rama Shandron. Oh yeah comes up

a lot, so he theorizes something similar. He says that laughter evolved as a signal to both ourselves and others that what may appear to be dangerous or threatening actually is not so today, when we nervously laugh, it's because we're signaling ourselves that whatever horrible thing that we've encountered isn't really as horrible as it appears. So that maybe what's going on when people are laughing when they're watching horror movies. Right, so it jumps out, it's this crazy

clown with fangs. The lady screams, but then she laughs because she's like, oh, it's just a movie. I'm okay. So this maybe why psychologists actually classify humor as one of our quote mature defense mechanisms. We invoke it to guard ourselves against overwhelming anxiety. If we can laugh, for instance, at traumatic events that are in our own lives, perhaps then that we can endure them, and it diminishes our suffering and attempts to convince us that we're going to

be able to make it through that trauma. But then here's what the question becomes. Is laughter creating an expectation that we're gonna be all right? Or is laughter only possible when we actually believe things aren't as bad as they seem. All Right, We're gonna take up quick break, and when we come back, we will continue this exploration. Alright, we're back. You know you were talking about the power

of laughter. And on a recent episode of Stuff to Blay to Mind trailer Talk Our Our Friday, eleven am Eastern Time Facebook live show, we had a trailer. We featured the trailer for the Name of the Rose, and one of the plot lines in that is this this idea of what is humor and should humor be permitted? Should humor being encouraged by the church, The idea being that if you can, if you can laugh at anything, you can laugh at the church, you can laugh at God.

And if in doing so, are you taking away some of its power? Oh? Interesting, Well, it seems to me that it would be inherently useful to the church if the idea was to provide its followers with soulas that everything's gonna be okay or that it's not going to be okay, and then you're gonna continually need to pray to God about it and it definitely shouldn't laugh. Yeah, well, it's a whole This is a gets into the whole theological deep end. Did Christ laugh? Is it okay to

laugh at certain things? Etcetera? And I'm not sure they're any clear cut answers on that well, turning away from laughter for a second before we converge back together and try to figure out what's going on here when people are laughing at horror movies. Let's talk about scares and fear. Remember, anxiety and fear are a product, not a failure, of being perceptive. Perceptive people are the ones who are most often anxious. The most fearful among us are often those

who have the most imaginative intelligences. Yet most of us respond to being frightened as if it's embarrassing, right, it's this petty emotion we don't want other people to see. As if the notion of being afraid is somehow indicative

of our insecurity about our control over our own lives. Well, we have to remember that evolution favors false positives, not false negatives, because if I mean the classic example is if there's some sort of a large carnivore hunting you, and you're you know, an ancient human, uh, prior to any kind of advanced technology. Then if your fellow, you know, cave person thog jumps out at you and you think for a second he's a tiger, and you react accordingly

like that that's a positive survival benefit. Whereas if an actual tiger jumps out at you and you're just like, oh, it's tharg again, well then your bone exactly. Well, that's related I think maybe to nervous laughter. It's been noted in psychological experiments when subjects are placed under a high degree of emotional stress, and this is specifically when they're thinking about perceived harm not to themselves but to others. Now, I've got a mortifying thought here that may be one

answer to why people are laughing in movie theaters. What if the person laughing at horror has what's called pathological laughter. This is actually when there's damage to a wide variety of brain regions and it produces abnormal laughter. So, for instance, like the most common cases of this are pseudo bulber palsy, gelastic epilepsy, and then just psychiatric illness in general. They found it in reported cases of multiple sclerosis als, in cases where people have tumors or lesions in the limbic

system in the brain stem. So it's just this like odd, abnormal, uncontrollable laughter. You know, I don't I don't want to engage too much in judging strangers that I have no

real insight on. But when I saw Baby Driver recently, there was somebody in the theater who was laughing almost continuously through the film, not just the humorous moments and the fun moments, but also just the moments of intense violence that pop up here and there and then really and and looking back, and I'm like, yeah, I could I could see that individual's reactions being a product of some sort of uh, you know, abnormal laughter scenario. Yeah.

I think sometimes my experience at the movie theater has been that, at least especially in the last ten years, it seems to be or that like it's this communal experience where a lot of people feel like that kind of like out loud reaction is allowed and part of

the experience, you know. I remember going to see one of the paranormal Activity movies and there was this guy behind us who was just like shouting at the screen the whole time, like, Oh, no, don't go in there, don't don't know, don't let that baby touch that dog, No,

don't do that. You know, you know, there's something kind of magical about that experience, Like I haven't been in a theater with that recently but when it's authentic, when the individual is speaking to the movie theater, uh, kind of organically and they're not showing off, they're not trying to do some sort of a riffing thing and being the life of the party, it is kind of it is kind of magical because I feel I feel like, well,

they're they're more alive with this film than I am. Like, I'm really into it, but maybe I'm sort of checking out now and again and thinking, oh, what's that actors been in recently? It's need how they shot this scene, strange, how they adapted this from the novel. But this person is living in it. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Maybe it's just what kind of media consumers we are too that might be part of it. Well, all right, let's try to bring it all together back around what is going

on when that person in the theater is laughing? What are they laughing at? Seems like there's no definitive answer to this question yet. Not a lot of research has been done on the neurological basis for nervous laughter, But there are two popular theories that revolve around the idea that laughter is inherently social, So laughter is sending messages to people around us. Likewise, smiling and socially awkward situations seems to demonstrate that you have nothing to do with

any external problem. Yeah, and this is again why I favor the benign violation theory, because if it's not social, then why is it disrupting my movie going experience? Yeah? Absolutely so. The first type of message that could be going on with nervous laughter seems to be an expression of fearful submission. So we actually see this in MCA

acts when they feel threatened or dominated. Their laughter is accompanied by evasive or submissive body movements, and this is used to admit their fear and communicate their desire to avoid conflict. This is actually first noted by primatologists Signey Pruschoft. He was the first one who primarily studied Reesiss macaques along these lines. He noticed that they also bared their

teeth in a smile during these social interactions. And this wasn't a signal to begin a fight or anything, but it was to dispel tension so that their aggressor would become more friendly. The smile was a display of submission to the more dominant member of their their group. Yeah, that's interesting to think of viewer of a horror movie reacting in a way where they're they're submitting. They're saying like, oh,

Jason vorhees right, please don't I submit? And then you realize, oh, wait, I don't have to submit to Jason Vores because he's pretend look, Pennywise, I'm laughing, don't meet me. We humans seem to have adapted the smile to express approval, joy, compassion, sometimes sympathy. But when we recognize a dangerous situation, we may still smile at it. And this line of thought

about laughter trends toward evolutionary history. Now, the second idea that's going on here is I mentioned this earlier, the mature defense mechanism that represents our denial of fear. So with this type of laughter, we're actually trying to convince ourselves that everything's okay, and it's a signal that we can endure whatever trauma is in front of us. So humor seems to be a way to put our fears into perspective. It allows us to strengthen our ability to

confront them. And then if you can laugh at something like that, well that surely must show you've got some courage or at least are you know, you might wish for that courage because laughter seems to banish anxiety. I'm thinking of the classic scene of like two gun slingers standing each other down and there both the stone faced and then one laughs are snickers, and it's like, that's

that's the the indicator, right, It's the same thing. That's what's going on with these maccaques, basically, like, uh, it's actually it's the opposite of what's going on with these maccaques, where it's like, rather than showing that I'm submissive, it's like I'm not afraid of this. I'm so not afraid of this that I'm gonna laugh at how silly this

situation is. Yeah, and I think we've seen that in various cinematic showdowns, like occasionally like that, the tension will be so uh, you know, grim that somebody will break it with about by saying making a kissy face or something. Right, Yeah, exactly. So there's actually an experiment that speaks to this in

which volunteers were asked to be head a mouse. They were actually like human beings were asked to volunteer to behead a mouse, and their faces were photographed while they did it, and when they did, the photographs showed that they had pained, uncomfortable smiles. This is like the creepiest thing ever that all these people were smiling while they were cutting the heads off these mice. I'm assuming these were dead mice. I don't know, man, I don't know.

I'm going to go with that assumption. Now, the first idea that we talked about, that one trended towards evolutionary history. This line of thought is more accepted by psychologists and neuroscientists, and actually Freud, for instance, was a big proponent of this theory. So maybe though, here's here's another backup, and this gets back to what you're talking about with forms of humor. Maybe this kind of nervous laughter is an

expression of incongruous emotional reactions. For instance, when we feel like we might be overwhelmed by our emotions, whether they're positive or negative, we might express the opposite emotion to have a dampening effect and kind of restore some kind of emotional balance. It's interesting that reminds me of the theory on the pinching of baby cheeks. What's that? This is the idea that occasionally you will encounter something so cute.

It might be a baby and be a puppy, a kitten so cute that you have to hurt it to like restore balance. So the baby is so cute, you just gotta pinch it. You've got to basically assault the baby so that you you won't just completely explode. There used to be a bit about this on that old

MTV sketch show The State. They had a whole bit about this old lady who was who her grandson was so cute that she had to try to crush his face and the people in the store that she was in We're trying desperately to prevent her from two inks, and it turns into this whole farcical adventure. Yeah, I mean, I've certainly felt the like the weird urge to bite an infant for executeness or a puppy or a kitten before it's it's a very strange situation. Yeah, maybe we

should return to that. That That is an interesting that's uh an interesting like crossing of wires in the brain, kind of similar to our episode on the Call of the Void. Yeah, um yeah, we'll eat you up. We love you so. Yeah. From The Wild Things all right, we're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back,

all right. So, um, I think at this point I want to come back around to some of the theories we mentioned earlier, uh, talking more expressly about humor, and say, all right, how do they how do they line up with horror? So, first of all, incongruity theory, which again suggests that humor blooms when people notice the disconnect between

their expectations and the actual payoff. I can certainly see where this could come into into play, especially with all the misdirections and jump scares that one encounters in modern horror movies and in haunted houses. That's a good point. Yeah, horror films may actually be a phenomena of both incongruity and transgression. So maybe we're laughing when there's this incongruous event that goes against our expectations or veers from harmlessness

into actual potential dangerous territory. It also brings to mind a Raskins somatic script based theory of humor, and this ideas that humor involves the activation of two opposing scripts such as sex no sex good bad, and humor comes from the incongruity here of these two activated scripts. So

like danger, but not danger because I'm in a theater. Now, as far as this superiority theory of humor goes, I think there's certainly plenty of misfortune to take pleasure in and most horror movies, either if you're kind of a terrible person, or if the movie encourages you to take pleasure in the mutilation and death of its characters, which

we especially see in so many nineteen eighties slasher films. Right, you have like the bad Boy, the bad Girl, you know, these various archetypical kids that the movie is basically saying, Look, they deserve to be killed by Jason or whoever the slasher is, and only a couple of characters are above that treatment. Yes, slasher movies in particular use this kind of old Testament punishment system as being an excuse for why there's such horrible violence being enacted, and it's supposed

to encourage us to, you know, be okay with it. Yeah, it's it's a very certainly a very sacrificial feel to it. So the next time you watch a horror movie, ask yourself, which of these characters are are okay? To die according to the film, and which ones are not? Yeah, and like, who am I made to identify with? Yeah? Right, in some situations you're made to identify with Freddy Krueger or Jason Vorhees rather than the like, sexually active kids that

they're slaughtering. Yeah, there was. There was a wonderful treatment of this. Years ago. There's a Michael Caine film titled

A Shock to the System. I've never seen this. It's quite good because he plays just a normal guy who suddenly realizes that he can kill people, that he can kill people in his life that he doesn't like that inconvenience him, or that there's to whom there's some advantage, you know, to murdering them, and and he starts killing these people, and for most to the film, he's killing people that we we see through his eyes and therefore think, yeah,

they should go. They're annoying, they're terrible, And we follow that up to a point and then we realize, Okay, I'm not cool with you killing anybody else anymore. Michael Caine, huh this have you seen Harry Brown? I don't think I have. It sounds very similar. It's another Michael Caine movie. Harry Brown is like Michael Caine is a senior citizen who lives in block housing, and uh, he essentially becomes

a vigilante. It just starts like murdering criminals in his neighborhood, even though he's like this, this kind of daughtering old senior citizen. Yeah, it all comes down to the question is the character or the slasher murdering the wrong sort of person? Yeah, alright, And then let's talk about relief theory. The states that comedy again is a way for people to release suppress thoughts and emotions safely. So for this kind of gets into the similar territory. So you have

this cardboard cutout of a person. Let's say it's um, I don't know. Let's say it's a bo us or or something more mundane, like a rude driver. Like without a lot of character investment, we're generally okay with the idea of Jason or he's killing a rude driver or or some other slasher person killing the bad boss. Whatever the the you know, the crude cardboard cutout of a human is. This is why the Hannibal Elector stuff is so popular because in a lot of ways, he's like

an anti hero. People see him positively even though he's the serial killer that eats people because he only well, it tends to only eat people who are rude, right, And yeah, I mean he eats the rude. It for us denizens of the real world, Uh, it is um it's it's quite wrong for us to eat rude people just because they're rude. It's at least a little bit icky to fantasize about eating rude people because they are rude. But we can safely get that same sort of relief

by watching Hannibal elector do it instead. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So all of this leads us to the connection between horror and humor, and this seems to have become increasingly popular in our fiction in the last few decades. Think of how many like goofy horror movies there are now, right, and the sort of silly combination of these. So I found this actual quote from one of our favorites here at Stuff to Blow Your Mind Stewart Gordon. He's the

maker of films like Reanimator from Beyond and Castle Freak. Uh. And he tells the story about how Alfred Hitchcock referred to Psycho as a comedy. Uh. And he said that Hitchcock's point was that there's this very fine line between getting someone to laugh and getting them to scream. And so perhaps this is why many creators like Gordon himself now are finding it best to just alternate between the two rather than going with like a straight comedy or

straight horror film. They're introducing both in the same context. But uh, why what's going on? They They're supposed to be different, right, Horror oppresses us, comedy liberates us, Horror turns the screws, comedy releases it. Comedy elates us. Horror stimulates depression, paranoia, and dread. They're supposed to be opposites.

I don't know. After this episode and talking about all these weird convergences between the two, it really feels like we stand at an intersection of of horror street and humor boulevard. I think so that the traffics flowing both ways. Well, and if we bring it all the way back around to it where we started talking about this, the trope of the evil Clown plays with this whole relationship of humor and horror, and it creates in itself this incongruous

object of laughter. Right, So it's no wonder that people were laughing while we are watching this new movie. Yeah, and you know, another factor that comes to mind is is that you have an individuals that are watching the film alone. Uh, and then you have individuals who are watching it more socially, like I was there with somebody, but we weren't really talking during the film. Other people were having more of a like a social engagement with

the picture. And you, of course can get into a lot of arguments about to what degree that's that's that's sort of breaking the rules of going to a movie theater. But still there's there does seem to sometimes be this to this drastic difference between their social engagement with each other during the film. Well, speaking of social engagement, Robert, if people out there want to socially engage with us,

how can they do it? Oh? Well, they can head on over to any number of our social media accounts. Were on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram. Uh, We're we have a group. Even you go to Facebook, you look up the stuff to Blew your Mind discussion module. You have to ask to join, but you'll probably get in and then you can you can interact not only with us, but you can interact with with other like minded listeners

to the show. Yeah, so I'd like to ask you, listeners, let us know what you think about this whole thing with people laughing at horror movies, whether it's in the theater or not. Do you think the theories that we presented are you know, potentially valid or is there something else going on here that we missed? And how does your experience with a horror movie and a haunted house

or haunted attraction. How do those differ? Because from my own point point of view, I don't really laugh while watching a horror movie generally, but I certainly laugh after being scared at a haunted house. Like there's for me, there's an experiential difference between the cinematic scare and the real world pretends scare. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And one last way you can get in touch with us about this

is the old fashioned way. That's on email at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com. The Big f