There are not many artists who dealt with Black Humour with success. A Professer from Victoria college, Palakkad who came to our college to lecture on absurd drama related some interesting instances of Black Humour.He remembered a Tamil movie he saw when he was a child, the name of which he didn’t remember. It was a song-sequence in which the two heroes sing in order to woo the heroine, in a boat. The boat is speeding through the backwaters and the guys are singing to their death to get a glance of the heroine. On one occasion one of these fellows fell over board as he was singing an‘adventurous note’ by hanging over the balustrades of the boat. He “sung himself to death” literally while the other guy continued singing and wooing, with out noticing the event which took place almost in front of his eyes. Get a shock or laugh! We don’t know really what to do. There you are with black humour.
There is another oft- quoted example, where a man who is about to hang himself tried to pull his trousers up, which went down while he “kicked the bucket”. There is an advanced form of Black Humour which can be called Macabre Humour.It is a kind of humour that arises from macabre and Horrific situations which we cannot suppose in life to happen, but used in films and literature to get some effects. The master of macabre Humour in literature is, in my opinion, Ambrose Bierce, the American writer. He was trained on Edgar Allen Poe, Hawthorn and Mark Twain and was their contemporary. He dealt with the themes of these writers with varying success, however he is today best remembered for his tales of Macabre Humour.One of the most famous tales is Oil of Dog,
a story I advocate for those having good nerves.
The story is about Boffer Bings and his parents. His father manufactured dog oil and his mother ran a studio where the unwanted children are destroyed. The young boy Bings worked as an errant boy for his parents. One day Bings happened to drop the corpse of a child in the cauldron of dog oil as he saw a suspicious policeman around the place. It was later reported that, that day’s dog-oil was of high quality and the Bings family began producing Baby Oils after that .The mother even began to kidnap children in order to put in the hot cauldron. One day the authorities asked them to stop the business. So one night both the husband and wife decided to kill each other and make oil .In their attempt both of them fell in the cauldron and died.
I must say that it is one of the bizarre stories ever written in literature in its content and the language. It is not easy to express what feelings this story evokes in our mind. Some other stories of Bierce in same vein are Bottomless Grave and My Favourite Murder. The effect of these stories comes from the light or disinterested treatment of mortality, which is generally a solemn issue for human beings. Topics and events that are usually treated seriously — death, mass murder, suicide, sickness, madness, terror, drug abuse, rape, war, etc are treated in a humorous or satirical manner in such works.
Alfred Hitchcock is one of the very few directors who made use of the effects of Black humour in his films. A good example is The Trouble with Harry (1950), which is generally regarded as a less fruitful attempt by Hitchcock. In fact it is an underrated masterpiece. In 1950s Hitchcock was in the top of his form when he produced films with, primarily, audience in his mind. However The Trouble with Harry came out of Hitchcock’s deep interest in the treatment of the story.
The film is set in an autumn in Vermont valley capturing picture postcard-locations of the village. Among the pleasant sights appears the dead body of Harry.Captain Wiles thinks he shot Harry accidently and want to bury him.Mrs.Gravely thinks that it was her blow that killed him. Sam Marlow, the artist helps Captain Wiles to bury the corpse, which is unearthed several times in course of the story until Dr. Greenbowl confirmed that the death of Harry was caused by natural causes and every one of the party were acquitted of guilt. They took the body home washed and ironed his clothes and left it open in the place where they first saw him and the their trouble with Harry was over.
The film was based on a novel of same name by Jack Trevor Story. The story seems to take place in world where death and all its associations are matters of little importance. But we know that in our world it is not so. We can’t joke in presence of death. That makes it chilling to see people deal with Harry as they go on interring and disinterring him and having a good time doing it. The film stands aloof from the whole body of works of Hitchcock, but unfortunately it is not acknowledged by audience and critics. Hitchcock was very much interested in presenting dangers and horrors in an unlikely atmosphere, which he illustrates as “the murder by brook”. Thus in marvelous autumn of Vermont the last thing we think of is a corpse and there it is. The film often resemble an absurd drama when the film goes on rendering various people’s responses at the dead body, like Dr.Greenbowl stumbling over it and apologizing, and the town tramp stealing the shoes of Harry.
Hitchcock’s 1972 film Frenzy continues his portrayal of Black humour. This is a horror film but it carefully interspersed with subtle humour resulting in the acceleration of macabre effect of the film. A necktie murderer is loose upon London in this story. As in every film by Hitchcock he reveals the murderer early in the film , a sex maniac who rapes and murders women by strangling with the neck tie. After the murder of a woman the murderer realizes that the pin of his tie is in the fist of the dead woman, whom he left in a potato sack in a wagon. He has a tough time in retrieving the pin from the fist of the corpse, which is stiff out of rigor mortis. The feet of the corpse come up and kick his face as the wagon moves when he struggles to take the pin from the corpse’s hand. This set piece is a fine example of black humour .The convulsions freezed in the face of the dead women seems comic at the same time horrible.
If we are chilled watching a macabre humour film, it’s a good omen. That means ‘God’s in his heaven’ and ‘all’s right with the world’. But if we feel its normal, begin to fear. Some thing has gone wrong.
The world may have become ‘black’. The trouble with black humour just begins then…
