Horror, of all the genres, is the only one that can provoke an involuntary visceral reaction.
Stephen Graham JonesRead
Making people laugh is so much more difficult than making them sad. Too much fiction defaults to the somber, the tragic. This is because sad endings are easy in comparison - happy endings aren't at all simple to earn, especially when writing to an audience jaded by them.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Creating comedy is often more challenging than evoking sadness because audiences are harder to please with happy resolutions.
Stephen Graham Jones highlights the difficulty of crafting humor in storytelling compared to the simplicity of portraying sadness. While tragic narratives can often come easily and resonate due to their emotional weight, achieving a satisfying happy ending requires greater skill and creativity, especially for an audience that may be fatigued by clichéd or overly simplistic joys.
Themes
HumorComedyStorytellingSadnessAudienceWriting
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote during a workshop on comedic writing to illustrate the challenges of humor.
More from Stephen Graham Jones
All quotes →We watch a romantic comedy because we want to cry, say, or an action movie so we can participate in heroics. Horror's different. It can hit you with a moment of revulsion so hard you might want to erase the last five minutes of your life, please.
Stephen Graham JonesRead
I figure anytime you put an adjective before 'writer,' it's a way of dismissing the writer.
Stephen Graham JonesRead
The way humor's usually used in horror, it's as a pressure-release valve; without it, the drama would escalate out of all control almost immediately.
Stephen Graham JonesRead
Most zombie stories, the problems they solve are not the actual zombies. The problems they solve are the human interactions.
Stephen Graham JonesRead
Every time I lock my people in a spacecraft or land them on an asteroid, the blood wells up again, and I'm writing horror. Horror's my default setting. It's also where I prefer to write.
Stephen Graham JonesRead
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