The Guide #262: Why laughing at the movies isn’t always funny

In this week’s newsletter: From A Space Odyssey to The Exorcist II, audiences can turn a serious film into an accidental comedy – but where does the line fall between laughing with a film, and laughing at it?

Before every screening at the West End’s Prince Charles Cinema, a public service message is played. It’s usually one read by John Waters, welcoming cinemagoers to the “most depraved and beautiful movie theatre in London”, before imploring them to “turn off your cellphone, asshole”. More recently, though, a new message has been played, read by none other than Timothée Chalamet, who made a guest appearance at the cinema last year. Along with the usual requests for phones to be switched off, Timmy makes an unusual plea: for audience members not to laugh “like Max Cady” at moments in the film that aren’t supposed to be laughed at. Because the Prince Charles mostly plays older movies, there can be what Chalamet calls a “disconnect” between the time that the film was made and today: ropey scenes of sex or violence, outdated language or technology, or anything else that jars with modern sensibilities and causes people to hoot derisively.

It’s a surprisingly real problem, not just at the Prince Charles but at any repertory cinema. On Reddit there are plenty of threads bemoaning people guffawing at everything from A Space Odyssey to the films of David Lynch, a phenomenon one film writer on Substack has christened ‘performative laughter’. For anyone caught in a cinema when this unwelcome cackling occurs, it can be a killer. There’s little more guaranteed to break the spell of a non-comedy film than laughter: scary movies are instantly made about 75% less scary, thrillers become less white-knuckle, dramas lose their weight.