Hitchcock may not be regarded primarily as a humorist, but a wicked, cheeky sense of humor pervades even his darkest and most perverse projects. He even stated in a 1969 interview with Bryan Forbes, “Every film I make is a comedy!” It may be hard to spot the comedy because it was so often intertwined with, and in fact used to heighten, the suspense. Take the scene in “Rear Window” where Jeff (Jimmy Stewart) staves off the advance of the villainous Thorwald (Raymond Burr) by grabbing and flashing camera bulb after camera bulb. Rather than closing his eyes and making his move toward Jeff, Thorwald continually takes off his glasses, puts them back on, and rubs his eyes with a shocked expression. It’s funny!
In John McCarty and Brian Kelleher’s book on “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “An Illustrated Guide to the Ten-Year Television Career of the Master of Suspense,” the authors quote Hitchcock describing his understated, sinister comic stylings as “the humor of the macabre.” He found “such humor” to be “typically English,” offering as an example, “It’s like the joke about the man who was being led to the gallows, which was flimsily constructed, and he asked in some alarm, ‘I say, is that thing safe?'”
If you’ve seen more than a few episodes of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” you’ll know it’s far more straightforwardly funny than most of Hitch’s films. Even funnier, sadly, than “The Trouble With Harry,” a film that was meant only to be funny, whereas “AHP” is a horror-comedy that leans largely on the horror end of the formula. So what went wrong?