It was the opening scene of Kill Bill, and Uma Thurman had just plunged a knife into Vivica Fox. At once, it began: a high, warbling cackle that cut through the Varsity 3 like a buzzsaw screaming through a sheet of galvanized tin. The owner of this ice-pick laugh was sitting in my row. Male, early 30s, and keen to tell us all: “Look at me! I have such a refined sense of irony that I am highly amused by Tarantino’s wittily postmodern disembowellings and decapitations!” He spent the next two hours reminding the entire cinema of this fact.
Now, human laughter is a beautiful thing. Is there any sound more lovely? Probably. I’d sooner spend an hour listening to Mahler’s Eighth than hearing a roomful of sniggering stoners. But the spontaneous bubbling forth of overflowing hilarity is wonderfully infectious. The problem with the braying oaf in Kill Bill was that his laughter was delivered for the purpose of informing everybody that he was laughing.
Laughter which is not spontaneous is inherently evil. The affected, intentional guffaw is the hallmark of three types of individual: James Bond villains, ingratiating toadies, and finally, that walking pestilence, the hooting pseud who poisons our cinemas, who affects hysteria to impress his date, his friends, and a roomful of strangers with his worldly sophistication. The Braying Oaf is terrified of not laughing loudly enough. He does not care that we, the audience, paid fifteen bucks for a ticket and forty-seven bucks for a small popcorn and would sooner hear the dialogue.
As hogs sniff for truffles, the members of this swinish herd tend to sniff out films with a dark or edgy sense of humour. The Braying Oaf does not go to Finding Nemo in order to assert his sophistication. What’s the point of uttering piercing shrieks of mirth at the vegetarian sharks? Everybody knows that they’re funny; the Oaf cannot impress anyone under such circumstances.
No; the preferred habitat of the cackling farrow is movies like Fight Club and Happiness. Go to such a film, and they can be easily spotted. Their typical call is a comingled bray and bleat, followed by a snorted inhale sounding like an oak dining table being dragged across a hardwood floor. “Behold!”, the Braying Oaf announces. “I am urbane and cutting edge, because I am laughing louder and longer than anyone else!”
A less-common subspecies may generate vocal noises to signal intellectual superiority rather than urbane sophistication. I saw Cronenberg’s Existenz in a packed theatre. A quiet scene takes place in a fast food joint. In a brief establishing shot, we see the name of the restaurant: “Perky Pat’s Diner”. The Uptown 1 was silent—then a single staccato bark echoed through the cinema.
It was, of course, the cry of the shrieking popinjay. What he had spotted was a nod to a short story by Philip K. Dick, called The Days of Perky Pat, which pioneered some of Existenz’s alternative-reality themes. In that single wordless syllable, the barking bacillus taunted the entire theatre: “Ha! There was a reference there which you didn’t understand! I got it, but you didn’t! That’s why I’m laughing and you’re not!”
The hooting fools are inevitably male, and are usually with dates. This suggests that their kind may breed – a chilling thought, and a dark portent. In the absence of mandatory castration, our best hope is that the honking moon-calves repel any potential breeding partners by their fetid personalities and their sweaty-palmed insecurity.
There is reason for optimism in this regard. When Kill Bill ended, the owner of the warbling cackle stood up, placed a white Stetson on his head, and then – I’m serious - put on a pair of sunglasses – indoors, in a darkened cinema, after midnight. Perfect. He’ll never reproduce.
