I saw the Coen brother’s latest expedition into playing with their audience and while I enjoyed it and its message about how art can only provide a slice from a story and therefore should NOT have a beginning, middle and end, I hated the dude next to me. Who wants to guess what I’m going to write about? Is it going to be the movie that I liked, or the person I disliked?

You were, hopefully, all right. This guy was a total doucheknob and it was 100% because of his laugh. His laugh wasn’t a grating sound or in any way painful ear torture, instead it was mind torture.

He came to the movie to meet his friend, but showed up 15 minutes after his obligation required him to show up leaving the person he supposedly cared about sitting by himself in between two groups of friends forced to defend an open chair with awkward claims of “I’m..uh.. y’know..I .. sorry.. coming.” Once seated, the bagnozzle turned his attention to quizzing his lonely seat mate on Coen brothers trivia he probably looked up on Wikepedia or in the AV Club of a Twin Cities publication just before he arrived. Though his friend kept attempting to interject with information about his day and life, the dude with the perfectly pleated shirt kept demanding to know whether Hudsucker Proxy or Intolerable Cruelty was the Coen brother’s most under appreciated pieces.

I’m a huge C-bros fan. I rank Lebowski, Raising Arizona, Hudsucker, and Burn After Reading all in my top 100 movies, with Fargo, Intolerable Cruelty, and O Brother being on the bubble. I also really enjoy analyzing an author’s intent and an author’s accomplishment when watching a movie. The man to my right also enjoyed the idea of enjoying the things I enjoy.

I have a piece of writing on my computer that I will never share on my blog because it discusses the concept of love, and that is the one thing I am unwilling to be open about on the internet. In this essay I start with explaining the four kinds of laughter. Condensed, here they are: 1) Feeling awkward and assuming laughter is an appropriate response. 2) Obligation because we know other’s want us to. 3) To prove we understand a joke/reference. 4) Guttural reaction. It’s laughter #3 that is the most infuriating to hear in a movie theater. (#2 is more infuriating to me in general conversation). #3 was the only laughter that Douche Ditches-his-friend used. The worst part of this was that he didn’t get the jokes. He would laugh loudly at parts where he assumed that a joke would go, but there was no joke. This is even worse because now he goes home assuming he’s smarter than the rest of the people in the audience because he got jokes that nobody else did, except that he just forced laughter at times when it would have been logical to place a joke.

What infuriates me most about his desire to be good at analyzing movies is that I assume he is good at something else, but for some reason has determined that this skill is a more desirable skill so he is going to fake having it. Not work to acquire that skill, but pretend he has it. He needs to realize that it’s okay to talk excitedly about fantasy sports, or American cheese, or brooms if that’s what you’re in to, just don’t pretend you like the same things I like because your pretension makes the rest of us earnest lovers of good cinema look like douchebuckets.