Aman who’s stuck at home with a broken leg kills time by spying on his neighbors and making up outlandish stories to amuse himself. Following a meet-cute at a pet shop, a woman delivers a pair of lovebirds to a man for his sister’s birthday and ends up staying the weekend—much to the dismay of his mother and his ex-girlfriend. A case of mistaken identity leads a dashing executive and his impeccably tailored suit on a cross-country caper involving planes, trains, and automobiles.
If you skip over the dead bodies, the setups for Alfred Hitchcock’s films often read like comedies. Or, as is the case in The Trouble with Harry (1955), the dead body is the comedy.
The director was known for his droll sense of humor during film shoots, in interviews, and in the introductions for his television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Still, his name is synonymous with the thriller and horror genres. Yet when asked why he didn’t make comedies, he allegedly replied, “But every film I made is a comedy!” I don’t think he was being facetious—at least, not entirely. There’s a reason he worked with Cary Grant, rom-com royalty, no less than four times and called him “the only actor I ever loved in my whole life.” And there’s a reason screwball icon Carole Lombard enlisted him to make a movie with her, his take on a comedy of remarriage: Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I don’t remember much about that one—not enough murder, if you ask me—but I do recall the behind-the-scenes tale of how Lombard matched his penchant for pranks. As the story goes, she brought a trio of cows on the set bearing plaques with the names of the film’s three stars: a nod to his, well, notorious quip about how actors should be treated like cattle.
From a psychological perspective—and Hitchcock loved playing analyst, not just in Spellbound—there’s a great deal of similarity between a howl of laughter and a scream of terror. Hitchcock tapped into the mechanism behind that duality with preternatural skill. Comedy, like horror, operates on the principles of tension and release. I always exit the world of a Hitchcock film with a jubilant sense of resolution or downright catharsis. Even at the height of dread, I feel taken care of, because I know that relief and release are imminent. After all, I’m in the hands of the Master.
I associate Hitchcock films not with fear but with the comforts of childhood. I blame… no, I thank my parents, who showed me and my brother just about all of his works by the time we were in middle school. At sleepovers, I forced my friends to watch The Birds and Vertigo. Before I knew the meaning of “auteur,” Hitchcock was the first director whose style—and silhouette—I could instantly identify. These are the movies I revisit most often. Knowing the ending, and the twists along the way, only enhances the fun. The question isn’t whodunit, but how’d he do it?
In a 1972 interview with Dick Cavett, the director likened the experience of watching his films to riding a rollercoaster or navigating a haunted house. The public’s response is the same, he said: “They scream the whole time, but they always come out giggling.” His narrative framework is built to elicit that very response. “If we’re designing the film, I’m sitting with the writer, and you say, ‘Well, wouldn’t it be fun to kill them this way or that way?’ And then you say, ‘Well this scene will make them scream.’ So you do it with a sort of lushness of enjoyment. No different to the man who’s driving the nails in that scaffolding who’s making the rollercoaster … And there’s that fine line between fear and what is comic….” He went on to say, “Making a picture like Psycho—that’s hilarious to me. It has to be.”
From his fourth wall-breaking cameos to his innuendo-laden visual puns, he rewards attentive viewers with the reassurance that we’re in on the joke. His erotic/neurotic shtick, as recognizable as the Lubitsch Touch, hinges on a kind of comic irony. During a tribute to Hitchcock at the 1979 AFI Life Achievement Award ceremony, fellow director François Truffaut summed up that tantalizing twist: “You [American audiences] respect him because he shoots scenes of love as if they were scenes of murder. We [French audiences] respect him because he shoots scenes of murder like scenes of love.”
The engine of so many Hitchcock plots, what’s known as the MacGuffin, is itself a joke. Explaining the origins of the term, he told Truffaut during their marathon interview:
It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, “What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?” And the other answers, “Oh, that’s a MacGuffin.” The first one asks, “What’s a MacGuffin?” “Well,” the other man says, “it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.” The first man says, “But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,” and the other one answers, “Well, then that’s no MacGuffin!”
Hitchcock films often take an Everyman and put him in an extraordinary situation. It’s a formula for relatable fish-out-of-water comedy, along with danger and suspense. His dialogue and scenarios offer a taxonomy of the many types of humor and laughter: droll, dry, deadpan (emphasis on dead), absurdist, and bawdy. There’s the giggle of relief and release (getting off the rollercoaster, exiting the haunted house, awakening from the nightmare), and the chuckle that seems to say, “How clever!” or, “How unexpected!” My favorite films of his serve up an intoxicating blend of screwball and suspense—the ultimate Hitchcocktail. (As he told Dick Cavett, “Puns are the highest form of literature.” He showed considerable restraint by not making a pun of both their names that would rile the network.)
Two of his pre-Hollywood gems, The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938), share DNA with the rom-com and slapstick forms: rapid-fire banter; an enemies-to-lovers arc spurred on by the forced proximity of a train compartment or handcuffs or a single bed; bonks on the head… These elements are played up for maximum laughter in the 1970s Hitchcock parodies High Anxiety (1977) by Mel Brooks and Foul Play (1978), starring Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase—and in the ingenious four-person stage adaptation of The 39 Steps, first performed in 1996.
If I were held at gunpoint by a suave Hitchcockian villain and forced to choose an all-time #1, I would probably name The Lady Vanishes. The film opens with nearly 25 minutes of uninterrupted comedy before the first murder takes place. An avalanche in a fictional Eastern European country leaves vacationers of various nationalities stranded at a hotel while they wait for their train. Much of the preliminary funny business is conducted in foreign languages, without subtitles. Fear not: hand gestures and facial expressions convey the essentials. After all, Hitch got his start in silent film. Among the British guests are two die-hard cricket enthusiasts, Charters and Caldicott, who just want to get home in time for the match. The duo proved such a hit that actors Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne went on to reprise their roles in three more films, plus radio appearances. The two leads, played by the abundantly charming Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave, first cross paths when she files a noise complaint against him. It does not appear to be love at first sight.
Iris: “You’re the most contemptible person I’ve ever met in all my life!”
Gilbert: “Confidentially, I think you’re a bit of a stinker, too.”
What snowballs into a high-stakes political plot, brilliantly choreographed within the confines of a speeding train (that most enjoyable of Hitchcock devices), resolves in the typical fashion of a marriage plot. With enemies and a dull fiancé dispatched, Iris puts an end to the romantic suspense, asking Gilbert, “Where are we going for our honeymoon?” His reply: “I don’t know, somewhere quiet. Somewhere where there are no trains.” Now that I think of it, the ending prefigures the Cut to End All Cuts at the conclusion of North by Northwest, from the honeymooning couple to a train hurtling into a tunnel.
Along with The 39 Steps, Foreign Correspondent, and Saboteur (not to be confused with the decidedly unfunny Sabotage), The Lady Vanishes carries an irrepressible anti-fascist message. It’s as sharp a Nazi-skewering satire as To Be or Not to Be (1942) or The Great Dictator (1940). It’s also a resounding indictment against willful ignorance and isolationism. Whenever I’m tempted to hide from the hideous headlines, I remember this unexpected truth spoken by Charters: “People don’t go about tying up nuns.”
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Hitchcock was a practitioner of musical comedy, but he had an ear for the cadence and crescendos of speech, whether dramatic or comic. The score is an intrinsic element of any Hitchcock film, most notably in his collaborations with composer Bernard Herrmann, who by all estimations was the Maestro of Suspense.
Beyond his work with Herrmann, The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, and Shadow of a Doubt all feature pivotal leitmotifs in the form of diegetic tunes: the theme song for music hall performer Mr. Memory, who proves to be the key to the entire espionage plot; the encoded song on which the fate of the free world depends; and “The Merry Widow Waltz,” which seems to jump telepathically from one character’s head to another, signaling Uncle Charlie’s true identity as—spoiler alert—the Merry Widow Murderer. The other piece of any Hitchcock score is the audience’s response: audible gasps and shrieks and laughs. There’s a scene in the 2012 biopic Hitchcock, starring Anthony Hopkins, that shows the director listening in on an early screening of Psycho for audience reactions during the shower scene. He waves his hands in a slashing motion, like a conductor-killer conjuring every scream.
Hitchcock managed to simulate the energy of live theater by anticipating and leaving space for the viewer’s reactions. You have to involve the audience, he told Cavett. He grasped the primal rule of both comedy and suspense: it’s all in the timing. The director’s personal favorite of his filmography, Shadow of a Doubt (1943) is imbued with theatricality, from its ensemble cast of character actors to its screenplay featuring contributions by playwright Thornton Wilder. Shadow of a Doubt explores what happens when evil comes to stay in a small town, in the form of the family golden boy, Uncle Charlie, played to sociopathic perfection by The Mercury Theatre alumnus Joseph Cotten. His adoring young niece, who’s named for him, is the only one who comes to suspect the malice behind his facade. As she discovers the truth, her crime fiction-obsessed father and his friend Herb remain oblivious, discussing various murder methods like children playing a game.
Young Charlie: Oh, what’s the matter with you two? Do you always have to talk about killing people?
Joseph Newton: We’re not talking about killing people. Herb’s talking about killing me and I’m talking about killing him.
Emma Newton: It’s your father’s way of relaxing.
Shadow of a Doubt was released in 1943, amid the horrors of WWII. Like so many of Hitchcock’s films, it’s about confronting the everyday evil hiding in plain sight, with a healthy dose of irony and humor. In turbulent times, I always come back to the comforting comedy and controlled chaos of Hitchcock. It’s not an escape from conflict—fascists and psychos and other assorted villains abound—but rather it’s a seductive heightening of reality. What can I say? It’s my way of relaxing.