Gutbrain Records

Saturday, 27 December 2008

Years ago I was at a showing of John Woo's The Killer at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square. The audience laughed loudly and continuously through the whole movie. They found something hilarious in every single scene. If Chow Yun Fat merely walked into a room, it was funnier than anything Buster Keaton ever did.

A few years after that I found myself at the Film Forum, again surrounded by an audience that couldn't stop laughing. The movie in question was Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. There was finally silence when Suzanne Pleshette's mutilated corpse was shown. "Why aren't you laughing now?" called out an irate patron to the momentarily hushed crowd.

Actually, this happens all the time. I've walked out of screenings of favorite movies because I can't stand the audience. It seems the only time it doesn't happen is when you're seeing some new Hollywood garbage. Dancing scenes in movies from the '60s can only be laughed at, but a dancing scene from now, be it a hundred times more laughable and stupid, well it's now. That's what it's supposed to be.

This comes to mind because of this article by Chris Fujiwara, in which he brilliantly describes and analyzes this laughter, even organizing it into four types: Pop-Trash-Camp Laughter, The Laugh Against the Strong Image, The Emotion-Disavowing Laugh and The Ideologically Knowing Laugh.