It's always bothered me that when people adapt Kafka's Metamorphosis they depict Gregor Samsa as a roach. Cockroaches do not undergo metamorphosis. They are born as nymphs which are just smaller wingless versions of the adult form.
Kafka writes that Gregor can only enjoy rotten food. Which also makes him not at all roach-like. Roaches strongly prefer fresh vegetables to rotten ones.
I always imagined him as a beetle. Which implies that the man Gregor was a larvae for all his pre-bug life.
@futurebird Someone once told me "It's not Kafkaesque to wake up an insect. If you wake up an insect and your first thought is that this might make you late for work...that is Kafkaesque." That completely changed my perspective on a lot of things.
@sinvega@futurebird Wow, I haven't seen this and it's great. I absolutely love comedy that juxtaposes the banal with the existential like that.
It's also why this commercial from Welcome To Nightvale lives in my head...not rent free, but certainly as a shabby deadbeat roommate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxaNCyWsWrc
@roadriverrail@sinvega@futurebird Night Vale has some great commercials in that vein. I'd forgotten about that one, but I'm glad to have been reminded.
As far as mixing the existential and the banal, check out Luke Humphris's recent work. Here's the one that I think spells it out the most directly: https://youtu.be/Yohfoz_50J4
@player_03@roadriverrail@sinvega@futurebird I have three Night Vale t-shirts because it helped me go through one of the worst periods of my life. If anything it captures perfectly how sometimes "humour" is just another name for acceptance of cosmic, existential dread.
@Illuminatus@player_03@sinvega@futurebird I've heard a hypothesis that laughter started as a way to signal "What I thought was a danger was in fact not." So, for example...unk bunk the early human hears a rustling in the bushes and goes into alert thinking it's a predator, but then only a tiny bird comes out of the bushes...hahahha! That's hilarious! I thought we'd die but it was harmless!
From that point of view, transforming dread into humor is a way to save us from our own thoughts.
The line between comedy and horror is thinner than either genre would like it to be.
...To which a commenter replied:
As someone who writes both, I will have you know that comedy has no problem with how close it is to horror. Horror, on the other hand, has never stopped whining about it.
And I mean, yeah. The unknown is a source of horror, but it's also a source of comedy, and comedic works can take full advantage of that.
Night Vale, for instance, does it all the time. Some kind of monster is invading, all hope is lost, we bring you now to the weather... Oh wait, it turns out the librarians were visiting town hall to file a complaint about their working conditions, and no one was hurt.
A Cat Scare is a strong buildup of high tension, followed by a fright that turns out to be something harmless (say, a startled cat) to release that tension.
But the article goes on to discuss how often this gets double-subverted. There's a dramatic buildup, it turns out to be something harmless (subversion), but then the camera pans around and reveals something actually dangerous approaching from behind (double subversion) while the character is breathing a sigh of relief.
So it turns out that horror can make good use of comedy after all.
Officials are saying not to let your phone ring suspensefully two or three times, because the call will likely be completely harmless—a neighbor or a friend—but be very careful after you hang up. When you're standing there relieved, that is when the horrible event is most likely to occur.
I always thought that he had wings too! Just didn't know how to use them. Could have F off out the window at any time he wanted, but no one, not even him could understand what he had become.
I thought that was the whole point of the story... We're all grubs, and Gregor reached the next stage... but none of the grubs in his family could understand him.
It's more the common illustrations of the story that have it wrong than Kafka. I thought the story was about how disappointing it is when your kid turns out to be a useless writer. Autobiographical about metamorphosis into the wrong sort of creature. A useless and horrible creature if it lives in your house rather than under a log in the woods, or flying through the forest.
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