Focusing primarily, though not exclusively, on North American horror films from the 1930s to the 2020s, David Gillota’s Dead Funny: The Humor of American Horror seeks to explain how humor operates in relation to horror and argues that “horror’s humor often functions in tandem with horror elements and contributes to a work’s tone, themes, and structure” (2–3).
Gillota finds “humor to be a prominent part of horror in most major periods” and observes that “many of the genre’s most canonical works and every recognizable subgenre” contain examples (2). The book features an introduction followed by six thematic chapters that view North American horror through the lens of specific humorous modes/devices, including parody, comic monsters, body humor, camp, awkward humor, and satire. (Notably, the book does not engage with the relevant ideas of dark comedy, black humor, absurdism, sLaughter, or the carnivalesque.) There is, not surprisingly, quite a bit of overlap...