Each week the ICoFF Blog will report on a different form of laughter that most people will have experienced or heard at one time or another in the cinema.

In the last couple of weeks you will have been familiarised with the alienating effect of liberating laughter and the contemptuous laughter of evaluation.

Today you can learn about the ashamed laughter of covering.

There is no place where people burst out laughing so frequently and in so many diverse ways at the same time as at the movies. Often, this diversity is overlooked. Laughter in cinemas signifies, usually, that something is funny. However, does aggressive, degrading, confirmatory, smart-alecky, embarrassed, irritated, cheerfully infectious or shocked laughter not sound through the darkness of the hall as well? Laughter in cinema is not a monolithic block of stones, but it is a  gemstone, which shines and glows in many colors. Even if this iridescent colorfulness is hard to keep hold of and constantly shifting - the following twelve forms of laughter in cinema are particularly striking.

The ashamed laughter of covering is a quasi-concealing reaction to a previous reaction of one’s own, which the spectator feels uncomfortable or even humiliated with. Examples could be the sharp, frightened outcry after a moment of shock or a bad positioned verbal comment that came out at the top of someone’s voice. Whoever detaches him or herself from the anonymous cinema collective with such a reaction, but then suddenly feels humiliated by standing out, could feel impelled to a submissive signal with which one could re-transform the resulting embarrassing situation: Stop, I am taking this back!

Next week: The aggressive laughter of mocking.

Dr. Julian Hanich, born in 1975 in Munich, is a scientific assistant at the cluster of excellence »Languages of Emotion« at Freie Universität Berlin. He studied and doctorated in Berlin, Berkeley, Los Angeles and Amsterdam. Julian Hanich is a film critic at the Tagesspiegel and writes as guest author for the International Comedy Film Festival Blog about laughter and cinema.