Fix Your Laughs or Die

We come to this place for magic.

We come to AMC theaters to laugh, to cry… to care.

…But especially to laugh.

Because we need that, all of us: that indescribable feeling we get when the lights begin to dim… and the Father John Misty-looking millennial next to us instantly starts guffawing so hard that he spews out his pressed juice into his mason jar. And we go somewhere we’ve never been before, not just entertained, but somehow annoyed beyond belief.

Together.

Despite being a disillusioned, cynical college student, I love going around to various New York movie theaters and having a blast as much as the next guy. There are so many great venues (Alice Tully Hall) in the city, minus a few less awesome ones (Paris Theater), and it’s always cool to see people here engage way more deeply with a movie than in the empty theaters of my hometown. There is, however, one insanely stupid trend among the film crowd: excessive laughing.

Before the token and uninspired “fun police” comments come rolling in, I’ll justify this by saying there are moments when howling-in-jubilation laughing is completely appropriate—you can find such moments pretty much anywhere you look, from comedies to black-humor dramas to hate-watch abominations. One of my favorite experiences is sharing the joy with total strangers in my theater and bonding with them over funny parts of a movie.

There are also situations where it’s totally weird to even think of laughing. People are, for whatever reason, doing it anyway. Here’s what Double Exposure Editor-in-Chief Ray Wu had to say on the subject: “There are definitely times where most of the theater erupts into laughter while I’m sitting there with barely a chuckle. Maybe I’m just not fun. Haha.” Ray’s savage, no-holds-barred takedown of the laughing epidemic exposes what many are thinking but are too afraid to say: a lot of laughter is totally forced.

One of the first times I started thinking about this was during a downtown screening of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), a poignant and sorrowful story of a man trying to redeem his many mistakes in the final months of his life.

I’m sitting in the theater as the main character, the old man Mr. Watanabe, is regretting the times when he was cold and distant from his son, who used to love him but slowly began to care for him less and less. I notice the guy two seats to my right, who just snickered during the scene of Watanabe’s cancer diagnosis, now beginning to shift restlessly in his chair. During an emotional peak, when Watanabe hears his son call out to him from his room and eagerly runs upstairs, only to be left heartbroken as the son disinterestedly tells him to shut the door, I am on the verge of tears. Suddenly, the snickering guy starts heaving with laughter. At first, it’s just him—but soon, the majority of people in the packed theater are quietly chuckling, and a few are even outright roaring in glee. I glance around, confused: how do people find such a powerful, moving scene so funny? Is there something that I’ve missed?

I kept this strange experience in the back of my mind but had mostly forgotten it until my friend and I went to see Sentimental Value at this year’s New York Film Festival, where there actually were a few hilarious moments. One of them occurred midway through the film, when Stellan Skarsgård’s character, the family’s estranged father, showed up at his young grandson’s birthday party—a nice gesture until he shocked everyone by gifting the boy DVDs of The Piano Teacher and Irreversible. If you haven’t seen these movies, they are highly unsuitable for kids, dealing with themes of S&M and rape. OK, a cinematic joke about cinephiles: very meta and very funny. I laughed.

Just then, something caught the corner of my eye… someone was moving around right outside my field of vision. I dared to glance over, just for the briefest of moments:

The crazy thing is that there were multiple people in the theater who were on the ground in hysteria, just like this dude. The entire place was deafening for over 30 seconds—enough to miss at least ten lines of dialogue. And even crazier was that my friend, whom I had to drag away from his Battlefield 6 screen to come to this movie, was dying of laughter too! After we got out of the festival, I asked him, in the awed tone of “I owe you an apology, I wasn’t familiar with your game,” when and why he had watched The Piano Teacher and Irreversible. His response: “What? Oh, I didn’t know any of the films they showed. I just laughed because everyone else was laughing.”

As we can see, there’s clearly an element of wanting to belong when we laugh in a movie theater, and in this case, it was either to prove “cinephile” status or to simply go along with the crowd. When other people are having a good time, it’s hard not to want to join in, and that’s a great thing—even when we don’t understand a joke, getting to build community with the people around us is ultimately the reason in-person cinema is so awesome.

Where this becomes more problematic, however, is in situations like Ikiru, where I think laughing is less indicative of “fitting in” than it is of a cultural unwillingness to engage with vulnerability. At least in my own experience, moments of intimacy, tenderness, and silence are becoming broken up by shouts, jeers, and laughs more and more often. This isn’t purely a cinema problem, either: popular indie bands like Black Midi and Death Grips have called it quits in recent years due to excessive unruly fan behavior during parts of their concerts that were meant to be taken in silence.

It increasingly feels like sincerity is becoming the final taboo. In a hectic culture that very much prizes irony, self-awareness, and performative “nonchalantness,” I often find myself wanting to avoid genuine vulnerability because it’s almost embarrassing—a breach of the new unspoken contract that everything, even tragedy, should be diluted through layers of humor or cynicism. The impulse to laugh at a moment of unadulterated sadness, as in Ikiru, is maybe a kind of collective defense mechanism. It seems much easier for us to try to restlessly mock or minimize emotion than to feel it for what it really is. The Internet has only amplified this reflex, rewarding quick wit, snark, and meme-able reactions over the discomfort of honest sentiment. It’s what I unknowingly played into for the first half of this article, opting for funny one-liners and a drawing over getting into what we’re actually talking about here: our growing unwillingness to care about anything.

So, in the event that you’re still agreeing with these speculations, what can you and I do to combat the sea of insincerity? Well, one of the simplest things we can try is using the theater for its intended purpose. In the cinema, where there’s no tablet screen to hide behind, the discomfort manifests through the nervous chuckles or loud laughter that drown out quiet beauty. Somewhere in that noise, however, is the fear of—and therefore the potential for—real empathy, real stillness—the incredibly human emotion that film, and art at large, is made to bring out. You can cry at the movies. You can be friends with the people around you, even if you’ve never met. You can really, genuinely laugh.

Dazzling images on a huge silver screen. Sound that I can feel.

Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place likе this.

Nicole Kidman in her viral AMC ad.

Caleb Lee is a first-year studying English at Columbia College. He is best known for his work on “Fix Your Laughs or Die.”