Comedy and the Vampire

This chapter focuses on vampires in comic narratives, examining the different ways the character has made us laugh: from Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), to Roman Polanski’s Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), to more modern presentations like What We Do in the Shadows (2014). To understand the humor, I begin with a discussion of genre, exploring how a character so synonymous with horror found its way into funny films or, at least, funny scenes. Such a discussion leads to a broader overview of the history of funny vampires in screen media. The remainder of the chapter examines some of the themes of these comic narratives. While a single chapter is too brief to create and execute a full taxonomy of vampires in comedy, I am nevertheless interested in examining some of the recurring situations where humor is regularly situated. In this chapter, I focus specifically on the humor of intertextuality achieved through references to earlier content and archetypes, riffs on lore and tropes, and the perennial fish-out-of-water narrative with immortal vampires grappling with the modern world.