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 ashamed laughter of covering.

Today you can learn about the contagious laughter with someone.

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 contagious laughter with someone is a passive and largely involuntary reaction to the contagious laughter of another spectator. To what extent the development of laughter is due to being contagious by another person can be revealed especially by one fact: In cinema, one laughs about things that would not have even evoked a weary smile when being alone. Some things are only perceived as funny because people are laughing. Due to the contagious laughter with someone, one might unexpectedly laugh jollily under its standards.

If we look back on the twelve forms of laughter in cinema, we notice that they are moving along a continuum. The categorisation ranges from the film-laughter (which has the film as the object) over the audience directed film-laughter (which reacts to the film but in fact turns to the audience with this reaction) to the cinema-laughter (which reacts to other spectators in the cinema). Here it begins to show that many forms of laughter as a reaction to the film are often only possible in the social environment of the cinema. The anonymous collective of spectators enables a considerably greater variety of laughter than the sporadic reception at home in front of the TV or computer screen. In this respect one can definitely perceive this list of twelve forms of laughter in cinema as the evidence for the collective experience in the darkness of the cinema.

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.