David Gillota isn't really interested in the emotional aspect of the horror-humor connection in his new book Dead Funny: The Humor of American Horror. He's more interested in defining terms. Each of his chapters discusses a particular kind of humor commonly used in horror films: humor derived from parody, satire, body horror, awkwardness, queerness and "gender play," and stock creature types (the scary clown, the monstrous fool, the ventriloquist dummy). He then supports his definitions with examples from various films--some not often thought of as horror-comedies, such as Psycho and The Last House on the Left, and some more obvious choices, such as Bride of Frankenstein and An American Werewolf in London.
Gillota mostly explains how horror filmmakers use humor to draw out the socio-political subtexts in their movies. I personally find that emotional similarity between horror and comedy more intriguing, though I'm not really sure how you'd get a full-length book out of that avenue of inquiry. Gillota mostly does a fine job of writing the book he intended to write. Sometimes I think he assumes too much, especially when discussing older films. I don't think the constant shouts of "He's alive!" in Bride of Frankenstein were necessarily deliberate references to a line in its predecessor that may not have been iconic yet in 1935, and I doubt Edgar Ulmer was deliberately referencing Frankenstein when he had Boris Karloff sit up in bed stiffly at the beginning of The Black Cat. But he certainly got me to think differently about how Dr. Pretorius created those homunculi in Bride, and it ain't pretty. And though Dead Funny is academic, it is very readable. However, moments when Gillota let his professorial guard down to make a personal reference or--curriculum forbid!--crack a joke made me wish he'd done a lot more of that kind of thing.
