Mixed ability audiences

I just got back from watching Guardians of the Galaxy (which is silly fun if you're curious, reviews here) and it reminded me how important it is to watch things with the right audience.

It's something of a cliché but how the audience you're with reacts to a film has an impact on how you enjoy it, especially with comedies. Whatever the reviews say I enjoyed Anchorman 2. I'm reasonably confident that if I'd watched that film in the same circumstances as I'd watched the first (with friends in university, on a tiny laptop with some beers) then I'd have laughed out loud far more often. As it was, in a nearly silent cinema where the rest of the audience was clearly not on the same page as me (with the exception of one other guy and my other half), it felt uncomfortable laughing at something I clearly enjoyed. It was a similar case with the Inbetweeners movie a few years ago, a nearly silent cinema making the film less funny while watching with friends takes it up a level.

Laughter is so often a shared phenomenon, hearing other people laugh makes your brain find things funnier while watching alone makes you chuckle inwardly to yourself at best most of the time. It's why sitcoms used to have laugh tracks, to trigger a similar response. The Simpsons Movie was another good example. Objectively a 6/10 film as far as being funny goes but in the crowded cinema I saw it in you'd easily feel it was an 8 or 9.

At the opposite end, nothing ruins a film like someone laughing out loud during a serious part, especially for films which skirt the line of taking themselves too seriously. Action films are the worst in this respect but Christopher Nolan's Batman ones are also at risk.

Getting back to Guardians of the Galaxy, it's a funny film. Self aware, crackling dialogue but so often it felt like the jokes bombed because nobody in the cinema was out loud laughing.

Maybe my local cinema just attracts the humourless and introverted?