The Price of Pride: What Can be Learned from "Laughing in the Dark."

 

Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Nightcrawler Experience!

Sorry I let this blog go into a bit of a hiatus for a while, I’ve just been extremely busy.
I had to postpone my other entry in the Summer at the Movies series so I could quick get in a couple of my annual Halloween- related entries. I’ll return to it in November, but for now, let’s get into Spooky Season!
I will be using some entries in the ‘Scares and Salvation’ guest message series I do each October for the youth group at St. John’s United Methodist Church to make these.
For this entry, I’ll be returning to the classic Nickelodeon show ‘Are You Afraid of the Dark?’

If anyone doesn’t remember when I took a look at an episode of this amazing series back in 2016, it was a show that ran on Nickelodeon from 1992- 1996, then got a bit of a revival a couple years after that, and in recent years Nick has been doing more with it, as well. The basic gyst is that a group of teens known as “The Midnight Society” meet together around a campfire at a clearing in the woods to tell scary stories to each other. It was often genuinely scary, especially in its first season, and played a big role in me becoming a fan of horror.

For this installment, I will be looking at one of the first and most well- known episodes of the series, entitled “The Tale of Laughing in the Dark.”

(Credit for this image goes to the user ijustgottaburger at the Are You Afraid of the Dark wiki at https://areyouafraidofthedark.fandom.com/wiki/The_Tale_of_Laughing_in_the_Dark?file=Eplogo2.png#Gallery)

This story, told by Midnight Society member Betty Ann (Who often tells some of the scariest stories on the show; She also tells the other story/ episode I looked at on this blog in 2016, “The Tale of the Nightly Neighbors”), takes place at an amusement park named Playland. One of its features is a haunted house attraction called Laughing in the Dark. In the final room of it, there is a hideous dummy of a clown named Zeebo, that scares the living daylights out of all who encounter it.

We then meet our episode’s main character Josh, his best friend Weegee (Why his parents named him that, I have no clue), and Weegee’s younger sister Kathy. They don’t enter the spooky attraction, but are fascinated by it, and desire to learn more about it.
The three of them discover that the dummy was based on an actual person, a circus clown who in 1924, robbed his circus’s payroll and then tried to hide out in Playland’s original haunted house, only to be killed when one of his carelessly- discarded cigars started a fire. So, the haunted attraction was rebuilt and renamed Laughing in the Dark, now with the dummy modeled after Zeebo, and a rumor that Zeebo’s ghost haunts the attraction.

 

(Say hello to Zeebo! Doesn’t he look jolly? Credit for this image goes to the user ijustgottaburger at the Are You Afraid of the Dark wiki at https://areyouafraidofthedark.fandom.com/wiki/Zeebo?file=Zeeboagainokay.png)

Josh refuses to believe this, and being an arrogant little punk, is determined to prove how brave he is. So, he accepts a dare from Weegee (Who had clearly gotten sick of Josh’s bragging) to go into Laughing in the Dark alone and steal the Zeebo dummy’s clown- nose.

Josh makes his way through Laughing in the Dark, and while he is scared at times, especially when the Zeebo dummy comes out, he does indeed manage to steal its nose. His cockiness soars to even greater heights at this, as the next day, we see him rubbing his victory in Weegee and Kathy’s faces.
Josh’s gloating proves to be short- lived, however; Zeebo is real, and doesn’t take kindly to thieves.
A few genuinely terrifying scenes in Josh’s house late that night lead to him fleeing back to the park and returning the nose (Complete with some cigars thrown in as a peace offering; Where a clearly underaged boy like Josh got them, I guess we’ll never know), so he narrowly dodges what would have likely been an awful fate and leaves while the mysterious old carny who runs the ride eerily repeats its slogan, “It’s the most fun in the park, when you’re Laughing in the Dark!”

 

“The Tale of Laughing in the Dark” was one of the first episodes of the series, and to this day is regarded by fans as one of the best. Some of the acting from a couple of the kid actors in it isn’t the best, but other performances are wonderful. The late Aron Tager (Who also appears on the show in a few more episodes as a fascinating recurring villain named Dr. Vink) plays both the old carny AND the voice of Zeebo, and brings plenty of scares to both roles. The faux- cheery Southern drawl he gives the Carny will definitely fill you with unease.
It creates a genuinely frightening atmosphere, between the “Spooky clown”- esque music, and some of the visuals used. The scare- factor particularly shines during the climax at Josh’s house. Even with Zeebo never seen in the flesh, just the knowledge that he is nearby and some of the things he does to freak Josh out will keep your skin crawling. In fact, Zeebo remaining unseen in those moments actually makes it even scarier, as it leaves his true appearance up to the viewers’ imaginations.

The campfire bookend segments with the Midnight Society are great, too, as one of the other members, Kristen, suffers through hearing the story has she is afraid of clowns, and the other members rib her about it while Betty Ann continues the story.

This episode was also rather impactful for the show, as several other episodes after it give good old Zeebo a mention of some sort (i.e. A couple episodes show characters playing a video game called “Zeebo’s Big House” which has a picture of him on the cover, and another episode has a girl commenting that if she puts on any more lipstick, “I’ll look like Zeebo the clown!”). The show’s writers clearly knew they hit on a real winner with him! In fact, in the 2019 sort- of reboot of the show, one episode had someone in the background wearing a Zeebo mask. I myself even a few years ago wrote a decades- later sequel to it for a Facebook group I’m part of!

All in all, “The Tale of Laughing in the Dark” truly is a classic episode of a classic scary show, and it holds up pretty well over 30 years later. Give it a watch if you want some spooky yet family- friendly Halloween viewing.

 

I’d say the main Scriptural message that can be taken from ‘The Tale of Laughing in the Dark’ is on the problems that can come from pride.

All the trouble that Josh got into all stemmed from his arrogance, his unchecked pride. He was so determined to prove how brave he was and have something to brag about that he stole Zeebo’s nose, and in the process incurred the wrath of a VERY angry ghost.

While in real life, letting our pride take over probably won’t cause an angry clown- ghost to come after us, it CAN lead to all kinds of other problems for us. Many consider pride to be among the worst sins a person can commit.

A big part of the reason why pride is such a major sin is because it can lead to people in a sense worshipping themselves as a kind of God, which is idolatry.

One of my all time favorite authors and Christian theologians, C.S. Lewis (Who some of you may know as the person who wrote the 'Chronicles of Narnia' series), described pride in this way: "“According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.” In fact, one of Lewis’s Narnia books, ‘The Horse and His Boy,’ dealt a lot with the problems that pride can cause a person. The main villain in that book, Prince Rabadash, ends up making a complete laughingstock of himself and ruining his own life purely out of his own ridiculous pride.

As Lewis pointed out, pride was what made the Devil who he is. He started as Lucifer, the Light- Bringer, God's highest angel. However, he became proud and arrogant, and believed that he could be the one to rule all of existence, and so he tried to lead an angel rebellion against God. He and his forces were defeated, the angels who sided with him became demons, and he became Satan. Then, in the Garden of Eden, Satan in the form of the Serpent used pride to trick Adam and Eve into disobeying God through eating the forbidden fruit, by convincing them that eating it could make them like God.Arrogant people can be such a headache to be around. It makes people think they are so superior to others, intellectually, physically, and in so many other forms. They become completely self- obsessed. An important consideration to make, though, is that while pride can be a very easy sin to see in others, it can be a very difficult one to see in yourself. That’s why it’s important to have good friends and family members we trust who we can stay accountable to, to help us keep our egos under control and stay humble.

Another reason is because pride so easily leads to so many other sins, as a root cause. In the episode, Josh’s pride drove him to steal. Pride in real life has driven people to steal, to cheat, to be cruel, and even to kill. I’d imagine many gang- related murders are done out of pride, either a desire for the killer to prove themselves, or avenge some perceived insult to their pride.

The Bible is littered with condemnations of pride. The book of Proverbs in particular has a lot of them. Proverbs 16:5 says that "Everyone who is arrogant in heart is an abomination to the Lord; Be assured, he will not go unpunished." Josh certainly discovered that. Proverbs 21:4 says "Haughty eyes and a proud heart, the lamp of the wicked, are sin." Proverbs 27:2 gives good advice on how to avoid pride: "Let another praise you, and not your own mouth; A stranger, and not your own lips." So, try to let others be the one to praise your achievements, not yourself.

All this isn’t to say that we should have a low opinion of ourselves, either. God made us the way we are, and we should enjoy and appreciate the gifts we have, and use them as best we can. We just need to make sure we keep a healthy view of them that’s in line with how God would have us view them.

One more quick thing to note: As bad of a sin as pride is, it can always be forgiven, by trusting in the humility of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. He truly embodied humility. As it says in Philippians 2:6-8, “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” He could have stayed in Heaven, as God, yet He humbled Himself enough to come to Earth as a human, live as a poor carpenter’s son, and died a humiliating death on a cross, all for the sake of saving us from our sins. THAT’S humility!

I’d say by remembering this, and staying humble, we can keep from ending up in as much trouble as Josh did and truly be the good, Godly people that Jesus intended us to be. Just be careful if you out of nowhere detect the smell of cigar smoke when you’re all alone!

That’s about it for this edition of the Nightcrawler Experience. Check back soon for another entry, I should have at least one more up by Halloween night. Until then, stay safe and healthy, and may God bless you all!