Annoyed moviegoers may be making incorrect assumptions about why others in the theater are laughing. Some audience members might be chuckling because something onscreen is funny ha-ha; others may be laughing out of discomfort, surprise, or recognition; still others might titter to convey that they understood an obscure reference. Or maybe laughter is just contagious.
“Sometimes I just hear someone else laugh and then it makes me think, maybe that was actually funny,” said Jordan Linekar, a manager for scripted and unscripted content at Paramount who sees movies in Los Angeles theaters about every other week. “Or sometimes people’s laughs are really unique, and I laugh at their laugh.”
In the book “The Audience Effect: On the Collective Cinema Experience,” the author Julian Hanich, a professor of film studies at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, defines 10 types of cinematic laughter. “In the darkness of the movie-theater one can hear aggressive, nervous, degrading, evaluating, embarrassed, shocked, disgusted, irritated, or contagious laughter,” Mr. Hanich writes.
Such are the side effects of being a voyeur among strangers.
Though it may be a human response to laugh — and to laugh for lots of reasons — some say that laughter can allow a viewer to avoid engaging with a film in a meaningful way when things onscreen get intense. Ms. Coburn said she noticed that audiences lately struggle to suppress snickers when films deploy melodrama, as in those directed by David Lynch or Douglas Sirk.
“People don’t know how to respond to that kind of mode anymore, because it’s so in your face and so saccharine,” she said. “I think you’re robbing yourself of a really important part of life if you can’t allow yourself to be truly overtaken by a movie without mediating it with laughter.”
At the same time, audience members who shoot the evil eye at people who do not share their own reactions may also be missing out on something, said Mr. Dieringer of Screen Slate.
“Sometimes when movies try to make us feel a complicated range of emotions they’re susceptible to being misinterpreted,” he said. “But I think that’s part of the experience of seeing films in movie theaters, and feeling those emotions not just about the film but about the reactions of the people around you. I think that’s what makes film-going really exciting.”
