Dark Comedy

There used to be a multiplex near my house that we called the “Babysitter 12” because it felt like, no matter the film on view, the theater was always full of people laughing, screaming, horsing around.I stopped going there after a while because while it was fun to be part of a boisterous crowd during, say, a Marvel movie, the constant din during more serious films grew distracting.

The Babysitter 12 closed during the pandemic, when people’s living rooms became their theaters.My colleague Marie Solis recently wrote a story for The Times about a “laugh epidemic” in movie theaters.People are chuckling aloud during violent, sexy and scary scenes in movies like “Anora,” “Babygirl” and “Nosferatu.” For some moviegoers, this behavior is appalling, disconsonant with what they think the appropriate response should be.Marie puts forward some theories as to why some people are laughing at moments that others think require more gravity.

Perhaps we became accustomed to watching movies at home and forgot our theater etiquette.There’s been such genre collapse in movies that it can be hard to tell what’s meant to be funny and what’s not — is “Babygirl” an erotic thriller or an erotic comedy? Maybe we’re uncomfortable with a scene so we laugh nervously, or we laugh to show we get a reference.I saw a fairly serious movie about a violent relationship in the theater last summer and was surprised at how much laughter there was during tense scenes.

I had the sense that groups of friends who’d been laughing and joking before the lights went down were having a hard time switching gears, that their laughter was almost like a glitch in their software as they went from the delight of a high-spirited night out to the sober nature of what they were watching onscreen.I remembered the experience of the Babysitter 12, how part of the reason I stopped going was because I didn’t like myself when I felt that others were misbehaving.My inclination was to be...