Angry moviegoers may be making incorrect assumptions about why other people in the theater are laughing. Some audience members may be laughing because something on the screen is funny while others may be laughing out of discomfort, surprise, or recognition. Still others may titillate to indicate what they perceive to be an obscure reference. Or maybe laughter is just contagious.
“Sometimes I just hear someone else laughing and then it makes me think, maybe that was actually funny,” said Jordan Lineker, manager of scripted and unscripted content at Paramount, who plays every other week. Watch movies in theaters in Los Angeles. “Or sometimes people have a really unique laugh, and I laugh at their laugh.”
In the book “The Audience Effect: On the Collective Cinematic ExperienceAuthor Julian Hench, professor of film studies at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, describes 10 types of cinematic laughter. , irritated, or infectious laughter,” writes Mr. Hinch.
Being a voyeur among strangers has such side effects.
While it can be a human reaction to laugh—and laugh for many reasons—some say that laughter can allow viewers to avoid meaningfully engaging with the film when things get serious on screen. Ms. Coburn said she’s noticed that audiences struggle to suppress the snickers recently when movies add melodrama, such as those directed by David Lynch or Douglas Sirk.
“People don’t know how to respond to that kind of mood anymore, because it’s so in-your-face and saccharine,” she said. “I think you’re robbing a really important part of life if you can’t really allow yourself to get past a movie without it being mediated by laughter.”
At the same time, audience members who look at people who don’t react may also be missing something, said ScreenSlate’s Mr. Dieringer.
“Sometimes movies can be misinterpreted when they try to make us feel a complex range of emotions,” he said. “But I think that’s part of the experience of watching movies in movie theaters, and feeling those emotions not only about the movie, but about the reactions of the people around you. I think that’s what it’s all about. That’s what makes the movie really interesting.