Any good current horror movies or books/comic? It seems horror has been infected with wokeness. I saw an article about Jordan Peele doing Candyman. Sad thing is he could probably write a good story but he is obsessed with race. The fawning articles about him and Ava Duvernay are absurd
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Comedy also has to have some truth to it. It can exaggerate, but outright lies tend to fall flat.
Horror is best used to explore the darker side of the human psyche, what people are really afraid of.
As for your Trump movie example ... I can't express in words what I want to convey, so I'll just ask you to watch Genesis' Land of Confusion video, and tell me if it's humour, horror, or both. It's basically the 80s/reagan era version of your Trump story idea (keeping in mind that the media of the time loved to remind us every day how The Button was being safeguarded by a senile old man.)
I never really paid attention to Genesis outside the Peter Gabriel era, so this was my first time seeing this video. The pop references haven't aged well, but it looks like some Henson puppetry, so it was very obvious they wanted a satirical tone since it got the viewer prepped for seeing ugliness and helped stage up bits of humor. I wasn't cognizant back then, so I do wonder if Reagan had to deal with some of the shit Trump did.
I could put such satire in its own category, but now that I think about it, it's pretty close to the rare horror+comedy (dark humor). Though normal dark humor tries to get a laugh where a person is held in a serious outlook ("I shouldn't laugh, that man is dying"), a satire goes a bit in the opposite direction by trying to get the viewer to take a comical scene seriously (the scene in the video with the man preparing to eat his own tongue is farcical, but he basically just committed suicide on camera). So I'd say that that video is technically both humor and horror, even though most viewers probably don't get much of a reaction watching it.
What do you think of slapstick humor? I think there could be a connection with jumpscare-type horror. They're both things that can occur through one's normal day, and each forces a feeling to emerge briefly. I was reluctant to state the bit about comedy needing truth because I think slapstick may be an exception.
That's not Henson, actually, that's the puppets from a British show called Spitting Image.
Reagan did so have to endure what Trump did; his age, the jokes about him being an actor (see: Back to the Future), especially about being the opposite lead to a chimpanzee (the Bonzo movies, I think there were only two of them. Hell, Francis the Talking Mule had more than that.) Implications that he was senile (as is shown in the video), that he was a cowboy who'd be more than happy to send nukes up Brezhnev's ass, that he was prone to confusing movies with real life, AND accusations of being too friendly with the religious right and being quoted as saying he hoped we'd be the generation to see Armageddon ....
My grade 7 teacher apologized on behalf of his generation the day after the election and we're Canadian. Sound like the "pozzed" shit that just happened? And this was a guy who had his own paddle, and made everyone he used it on sign it.
Slapstick? Well, it's humourous when it's not you, and if the person isn't really hurt. Yeah, it can be funny to see someone fall on their butt, as long as all that happens is a sore-ish butt. It's a simple form of humour that can be understood without language, so you have prank shows like Just Kidding (from the Netherlands) and _Just for Laughs: Gags (from Montreal), not to mention Mr Bean. Hell, even other species seem to find jump-scares and slapstick amusing, when they do it to you. The Three Stooges were something of their own time, because movie effects and tricks were kind of new, and their slapstick utilized all of it.
Hm, I didn't think anyone else was putting effort into puppets back then. I'll see if I can find some of that Spitting Image show. I'll also look for those other shows you mentioned, as I get little exposure to foreign comedy.
Would you say the Reagan criticisms and mockeries were warranted? That'd be my next guess to differentiate between him and Trump.
This is an interesting point to me. I recently was introduced to the idea that humans are distinguishable from animals in our ability to have complex and intentional reactions to fear. An animal is practically limited to adrenal responses (fight, flight, freeze), but a human can break away from the responses a bit more cerebrally to engage in an informed strategy. You could then say that jump-scares are a bestial fear (and also that there are more ways to make humans feel fear than animals). Perhaps there's a similar explanation for slapstick and humor?
Well, the humour of Spitting Image would be really aged, since it's political humour in and of itself (and specifically British politics, at that). It does seem to be around, though. As for puppets in the 70s and 80s, puppets were mostly confined to kids' shows, Hot Fudge (feat, Arte Johnson) and Kookla, Fran and Ollie, as well as the Saturday morning Krofft crap. The Muppet Show brought puppet shows back to being respectable for adults to watch. The early-20th century music and themes brought in the very old in and of itself.
Did Reagan deserve the rap he got at the time? Well, considering most of the Reagan-fear was over being nuked, and ... we're still here ... then, I guess not. BUT in an echo of today, they had us kids/teenagers pretty much convinced we wouldn't live to see 1990, because Reagan and Breshznev (oh, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Two Tribes.) A lot of cold war stuff was blazed at us before Gorbachev came along and things seemed to .. .calm down (and we started getting crap like Enemy Mine and all kinds of "Russians are just like us" stuff in the media.) And one of the tenser times came when Leonid died and was replaced by two or three geezery old hard-liners, but none of them lived very long. But yeah, we had to watch If you Love This Planet in school, and do a report on The Day After, of all things. Does any of this nonsense echo? Only it's cold war/nukes, not "muh slavery" or whatever shit this is supposed to be about this time.
I don't think there are "limitations" at all with non-humans beyond the limitation of not being able to query them directly about things. I have had to deal with humans were who intelligent (ie, not mentally damaged or really seriously lacking in IQ) who had no language/fucked up language/didn't speak my only language. I can make dumb assumptions about what I see, too, and remember, people who do things to other species in labs are fucking psychopaths, adn Descartes was excusing psychopaths who wanted him to defend nailing dogs to tables in the middle of the street while cutting them open, alive, so they could show how "smart" they were. And the same dumb assumptions have always been made about those who look different, or can't speak proper. Humans in my observations do not react any more "intelligently" in an emergency situations than anything else does, and in fact, sometimes when they DO start to think, they do the exact wrong thing. So put your human conceit aside before asking me shit like this. They're different, but they're not retards. And dogs are more like children, than Downies, and they're not lacking shit any more than humans who have no mind's eye and no internal dialogue ....... and who can't think, so it's pretty arrogant to hold on to old assumptions when we know not all HUMANS have verbal thoughts. Impulse control? A well-trained dog has that, unlike the retards that used to attack kids on our way to school .... and they would get excused when we tried to report them.
Basically, it's just funny as shit to see someone jump out of their skin when you leap out of the bushes at them. And playing, pranks and gametime is always a form of life practice, for predator and prey alike.