Chainsaws in Popular Culture - Object of Comedy

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".