Laughter in the Dark

I went to see Richard III at the Globe a few weeks ago. Mark Rylance was brilliant - shaggy; languid; ursine; subtly, pitifully repulsive - and, along with the rest of the cast, didn't bat an eyelid when a man in Bay C had what looked like a stroke and was gently extricated by a hoary team of ushers. But what spoilt the evening was the lady sat directly behind me, who didn't stop laughing throughout the play.

Richard III has its mildly funny moments, especially with old Rylance pantomiming to the front row, but it was telling which bits made her laugh: any vague mention of key plot or thematic buzzwords ('The Tower', Bosworth, a red rose, boars, Wales) elicited the strangest type of laughter, the sort of laughter you only hear in the theatre. It starts as a knowing, "don't say I didn't warn you"-type throat-clear, then shifts up a semitone into a hollow, self-congratulatory guffaw, and is often followed by a leisurely glance over the shoulder to see who else got it. It is divorced from humour. Yet the most depressing thing about this laughter is that the lady behind me was just one of dozens in our audience guilty of it: indeed, it seemed to become a sort of inane competition for who can understand or recognise a particular bit first.

Don't get me wrong, I love a laugh as much as the next man, even in a theatre (I once saw Rory Bremner live - a wonderful evening). But there's something about older, slightly more complicated plays and earnest new ones that elicits (from certain people) this smug, tepid, middle-class rictus-gargle. It is not the sound of people enjoying themselves, but of a stupefying, centuries-old, socio-intellectual flock insecurity. They are laughing at the shadows of the dialogue rather than the dialogue itself. The exaggerated public laugh is self-indulgent cultural territory-marking, the equivalent of cocking a hind leg over a work and pissing on it (or, indeed, farting on it). People who laugh like this are cousins to head-nodders and knee-tappers at sit-down music gigs (see any Later with Jools Holland audience) and those who preach and preen in art galleries.

Is it just me? Am I a grumpy git? Is there anything wrong with people laughing whenever they like? Unlike many, the sound of other people's laughter during a performance can turn me into even more of a bad mood bear. A Tim Key gig last year was tarnished for just this reason, and I adore Tim Key. In the Holy Trinity of high-end ‘art comedy', if Stewart Lee is the Father and Daniel Kitson the Son, Key is the e.e.cummings-flecked Holy Ghost. He is peerless. But I was sat on the very right of a horseshoe-shaped auditorium that night in Edinburgh and had a view of the entire audience, whose readiness to laugh at every single tiny gesture made the laughter track on series three of Little Britain seem understated. It reminded me of the same sort of empty, sycophantic laughter you get when, say, Tom Cruise goes on Jonathan Ross, the laughter of people who are saying “I've got a ticket to Tim Key and I'm laughing at him” (completely different to the nervous, bewildered, more scattered, occasionally thunderous laughter that met his early gigs).

God knows why we laugh when we do. You’ve Been Framed was on the other night: I watched some of it, perversely curious and staggered that it was still on, and it shames me how often I laughed (most of the clips involved old men falling onto or into things, like ponds). But I find even the computerised canned laughter of YBF has more soul than this theatre laughter, which reverberates with a sort of socio-cultural, unthinking mob clang, almost like a football chant or a prescribed response in a religious order of service. By all means have a drink when you’re at the Globe: you might even hire a cushion for a pound. But before you laugh, just think: did you really find that bit funny, or are you just showing off?