Comedy, Horror, the CIA, and the Return to Normalcy

Comedy and horror are both, funnily enough, horribly misunderstood. Generally, people think of the two as unrelated, since some people will only watch comedies and others would only watch horror movies. But, as an expert on both (my mom thinks I’m funny and everyone else thinks I’m creepy/scary), I will reveal that they are the same, except that horror lacks one key component: the return to normalcy.

No, I'm not going to talk about this movie.

Comedy is the act of bringing together two disparate ideas. Kids find farts funny because it draws the natural “events” of the human body to societal convention that deem those “events” wrong. In other words, “Daddy said I shouldn’t fart, but I do it anyways.”

You better not have been expecting a picture... you're disgusting.

For an example of an actual joke, there’s a joke about eating habits in the Netflix show The Kominsky Method. The scene requires a setup, where Alan Arkin’s character watches a potential love interest eat her food on her plate, one at a time. There’s nothing funny about this scene, except maybe how much Alan Arkin is staring. In a conversation after the fact, Arkin confesses to a friend that he doesn’t like her because she eats like a Nazi, taking over one thing at a time. The joke ties a connection between a funny style of eating, a completely normal event, in the context of a conversation, in a completely normal event, to a regime of radical terror. The setting of the joke constitutes the “return to normalcy.” We only laugh because we find the joke about such a trivial event in such a normal environment. Otherwise, we might be afraid of the woman who eats like a Nazi.

From left to right: Alan Arkin, the Lady Who Eats Like a Nazi

Horror (or terror) also brings two disparate ideas together, but it does so without any resolution. Tropes like jumpscares should scare you because they make you aware of your sitting calmly in a chair outside of the movie, only to surprise you with a monster appearing right in front of your eyes. Movies like A Quiet Place show a monster moving abnormally fast through the woods very briefly to convince you that they can and will kill you, challenging your certainty that you will survive.

Both examples I just gave, however, are terrible examples of horror. Everyone criticizes jumpscares for being cheap tactics that only frighten, not make people afraid, and people also confess that seeing a monster robs the film of any scare factor it might have had.

These tropes of horror films are bad because they feature this return to normalcy. After the jumpscare passes, there is nothing keeping the tension, and so the audience is left completely intact, despite the threat the monster seemed to have posed. If you were being chased by a bear through the woods, and it tackled you, but then just licked your face a couple of times, you would probably laugh, not scream in horror. While there are no supernatural events in a movie like The Sorcerer, it creates a horrific atmosphere by never resolving the main character’s issue: the unstable nitroglycerin in the backseat of their janky truck can explode at any time, and crossing a ravine doesn’t prevent the chemicals from exploding. Thus, the feeling of horror does not have any return to a normal environment.

That truck is full of nitroglycerin, which is also their only way out of the slums in South America. I strongly recommend the film, but if you want to be different you can also watch Wages of Fear, the French film that inspired this movie.

This article is not suppose to be an exhaustive list for funny or terrifying motifs, but instead a summary of why considering horror and comedy as the same, except for one difference, makes sense.

After all, I subscribe to this idea because of my personal experience, and not because I listened to a debate with Stephen King or Dave Chapelle.

When I was young, I played a Slenderman game where I had to take pictures of notes around secluded woods, all-the-while being chased by the abnormally tall, abnormally white man in a suit. I was almost too scared to play the game, being a sensitive little boy, but an idea came to me. I would seek out Slenderman instead of the notes, and pretend that I was documenting him for some equivalent of National Geographic. By some miracle, all my fear slid away as I searched for the tall white man, and a smile crept onto my face. The game became fun. Thinking back onto that experience, when I fit Slenderman into my brain as if he were an undocumented species, and I was doing my job to help identify him, it changed the experience from a fear of being hunted to the mundanity of working. This is the return to normalcy that made the scary game funny.

Ah, the memories.

Recently, I watched a virtually unknown movie called Uncle Kent 2, which recounts the story of a man who tries to make a follow-up to a successful film that documented his sad life. This comedy’s gimmick is integrating continuity errors to show that the world (inside the movie) could be a simulation. It moves from a doctor’s office, where the physician’s shirt changes color, to a world-ending apocalypse where screaming at a crowd of people to shut up makes them disappear. The world grows more and more illogical, and it creates a fear in the viewer, even though the movie shows the main character levitating while vigorously “stimulating” himself underneath bedsheets, which sounds like a joke. Ultimately, the movie ends with breaking a fourth wall by showing the movie get deleted on a desktop screen, showing that it was actually a simulation. But it never shows who controls the computer, whether it be a person, alien, the computer itself, or some other AI controlling the computer. The movie could never return to daily life, which leaves the viewer with horror that they must confront.

It's weird.

Since horror is so similar to comedy, it makes sense that one man’s joke might be horrific to someone else. It’s important to remember when we make posts on social media or when we talk to people we don’t know well.

But, almost completely unrelatedly, it applies when WikiLeaks revealed a lot of classified information within the CIA, including the names of different programs the CIA used. Among them was their model of the internet where they could test different tactics of information dissemination. The names of the files included Abstergo Industries and Umbrella Corporation, showing the people who made the file had a sense of humor, naming the file after secret programs in video games. But the great offender to me is Sarif Industries, the name of a company in the Deus Ex series. In the Deus Ex universe, there is an Illuminati made up of leaders of giant corporations that control governments and have secret plots that the general populace is not aware of.

It's very moody, it's very campy, and it's very cool. Not pictured: people that are augmented is a metaphor for a person that is a minority, there is a central media conglomerate called Picus controlled by an AI, and without any choice you are an agent of both the Illuminati and a hacker group that wants to bring down the Illuminati.

A couple days ago, I read about a coverup of a child sex trafficking ring by a future member of Donald Trump’s presidential cabinet, where Jeffrey Epstein and “any potential conspirators” were granted immunity of all federal charges for no stated reason. Considering that there was nothing in the news about this piece of investigative journalism, it feels like many media companies might be purposefully turning a blind eye to the case. For reference, the Miami Herald, who wrote/sponsored the exposé, is owned by the McClatchy company, which has no ties to the big media conglomerates like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon. And when CIA employees name a surveillance/spy program after a game series devoted to the idea of covering up information, I am horrified. Cyberpunk worlds suddenly seem all too real, for me anyways.

Update: the newspaper has posted many stories about it, which has resulted in the public eye seeing it, and now something may be done about it.

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If you're interested in the exposé, here's the link: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article220097825.html

If you're interested in the government keeping us in the dark, there's a thesis submission by a Masters student at the Navy back in 2005 about how the US could use "memetics," or memes, to influence public opinion:

https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a507172.pdf

There is a disclaimer that says the Thesis does not represent any opinion or action of the US military, but it still presents a potentiality.

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