Object of Comedy
Although the original portrayals of chainsaw violence worked on its capacity to inflict gory damage upon a human body or sadistically produce pain, its prominence in low budget B-movies has since produced a separate image of the chainsaw as a comedic, often campy expression of over the top terror.
This image is often drawn upon in cartoons, comedy series and comedy films. It has appeared occasionally as part of the post-Scream wave of self-referential horror, for instance David Arquette's The Tripper.
One of the most famous stereotypes of comedic chainsaw portrayal is that of the chainsaw wielding lunatic in a hockey mask (seen for example in the Simpsons episode "Cape Feare"). Ironically, horror cinema’s archetypal hockey mask killer Jason Voorhees has never actually been portrayed wielding a chainsaw in a film, though chainsaws have been used against him in some films.
The band Arrogant Worms have a song called "Malcolm", in which the title character "solves his problems with a chainsaw and he never has the same problem twice".
Read more about this topic: Chainsaws In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the words object of, object and/or comedy:
“Anxiety is not fear, being afraid of this or that definite object, but the uncanny feeling of being afraid of nothing at all. It is precisely Nothingness that makes itself present and felt as the object of our dread.”
—William Barrett (b. 1913)
“The sick man is taken away by the institution that takes charge not of the individual, but of his illness, an isolated object transformed or eliminated by technicians devoted to the defense of health the way others are attached to the defense of law and order or tidiness.”
—Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)
“Unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)