24: Nonstandard Scenes of Hudsucker: Laughter
Think about the last time you were watching a show or a movie or just read a tweet and you laughed. One second maybe? Two if it was a real gut buster? Maybe it was one of the funniest things you’ve ever seen like that time Snoop Dogg said “pie in the horse” on Family Feud and you got a solid 15 – 30 seconds out of it.
It’s probably difficult to remember the last time you spent a solid minute and a half of laughter.
Once Norville has rescued Sidney Mussburger by getting a steady hold on his pants, he is promoted to the position of President of the company. He gets a makeover to get that modern New York Sophisticate look. He is feted by the press, but also his promotion and prominence causes Husucker’s stock to sag. He gets a new suit. He also gets a giant and bright new office. All of this is communicated through the medium of laughter. No dialogue, just the strains of Elgar and laughter for a minute and a half.
The montage is relatively short as far as film scenes go, but at the same time is the perfect length of time. Laughter rarely lasts for a minute and a half. It’s likely that were it to continue it would become jarring and grating rather quickly. The montage is stitched together across multiple locations over the course of several days with a clever set of edits. First as Norville laughs in the Hudsucker board room standing in front of an art deco relief the camera zooms in on his laughing face, cutting to the same image as the cover of the Manhattan Argus that Norville is reading as he laughs in the barber’s chair as he’s being made over.
The same close up of him in the barber’s chair itself becomes the cover image of the next day’s Argus sitting on a table in the tailor’s where Sidney Mussburger refused the double stitch.
As Luigi the tailor laughs about his windfall while holding up his tape measure the scene cuts to a member of the Hudsucker board in the same angle holding a stock ticker tape in the exact same position.
As the board laughs the camera tracks from the stock ticker in the board room down towards the floor and the scene cuts to a pile of ticker tape in Sidney Mussburger’s office, where the camera tracks to yet another issue of the Manhattan Argus with a picture of Norville on the cover*, which cuts to Norville in the same position in his brand new office, with the camera tracking away from him as the scene ends.
Many an aspiring Tik Tok artist owes a debt of gratitude to the Coens and their laughter montage.
TikTok: as complicated and difficult as filmmaking but without the artistic merit!
Laughter is of course primarily the human response to funny things. When Dr. Zoidberg on Futurama says “now open up that mouth and let’s have a look at that brain”, I laugh. When the Hudsucker board first lays eyes on Norville Barnes, the idiot who barged into Sidney Mussburger’s office, showed him a picture of a circle, set his leg on fire, poured about 5 gallons of water all over the floor, destroyed dozens of pages of the highly sensitive Bumstead contract, and smashed a no doubt difficult and expensive-to-replace window on the building’s 44th floor*, they laugh. “Behold this dipstick that just fell into my lap!” implies Mussburger “he is our idiotic salvation!” His mere existence to the Hudsucker board is a hilarious joke, and so they laugh.
Laughter also is an expression of general joy, that something is going immensely well, typically accompanied by a feeling of immense excitement. I will laugh with joy on an amusement park ride as I zoom on a tilt-a-whirl or a roller coaster. The Hudsucker board appears to be laughing with joy at the fact that Sidney Mussburger has found them the bozo to pilot the company’s stock into the earth’s core. They laugh as they kiss the stock ticker tape in the boardroom, apparently seeing early signs of success. I have yet to laugh with joy at a financial project working, but I’m not a member of the board of a high powered corporation. Different people can find joy in different things.
The most striking aspect of the laughter montage though is the laughter of Norville himself. For the most part his laughter is stilted and unnatural. On one level it’s understandable from a logistical filmmaking perspective. Real laughter, especially sustained and continuous laughter, is difficult to fake. It’s a spontaneous physiological response in a lot of ways. Acting sad or happy or confused or thoughtful is one thing, as most of these are semi-conscious physical responses to inner feelings. Laughter — true laughter — is like sneezing or having an orgasm, something that happens to our bodies almost will we or nill we. Even as talented an actor as Tim Robbins could find it difficult to fake convincing laughter for a minute and a half. There’s also a satisfying in-universe reason for Norville’s stilted laughter. Norville isn’t in on the joke. He’s laughing simply because everyone else is laughing. Laughter can both be an expression of joy but also discomfort. We laugh because we’re nervous at times, and who wouldn’t be nervous in a room full of incredibly powerful men standing around you and howling with laughter for no good reason. Laughter is also contagious. When we find ourselves in a room full of laughing people the slightest thing can set us off into our own peals of laughter, the existence of this phenomenon is the only possible thing that can explain how anyone has laughed at 90% of the average Saturday Night Live sketch from the past 10 years or so. Norville has no reason to laugh, he sees nothing funny, but he’s surrounded by others laughing, and so he doesn’t want to feel left out and he laughs an awkward and stilted laugh. The weird thing about laughter though is that the laughter can cause the very feelings that are meant to be reflected in laughter, which is the only way I can explain Norville’s laughter at the end of the scene which is of a wholly different character to the rest of his laughter. At the final cut of the montage, no one is laughing but Norville, and for the first time his laughter feels genuine. There’s a strange little phenomenon called “laughter yoga”, wherein adherents will imitate the physical act of laughing (often in a kind of creepy sounding way) regardless of nothing being funny because they believe that laughing for roughly 20 minutes a day has positive physiological effects, and weirdly they’re right. Multiple studies have backed up the idea that laughing —regardless of whether or not there is a reason for the laughter— can have the same de-stressing effects as genuinely experiencing a funny or joyful event. Adherents of laughter yoga will say that the laughter begins artificially, but soon one is laughing genuinely and experiencing the real physiological joy of laughter. Perhaps this is the experience of Norville Barnes. In the beginning while he’s still wearing his mailroom apron and dorky suspenders his laughter is stilted and nervous. A minute and a half later he’s sitting alone in his own cavernous office in a brand new suit probably worth more than any paycheck he’s ever earned, and his laughter comes in ripples and peals, completely natural, like he’s just heard a Mitch Hedberg record for the first time. Somehow Norville is in on his own joke and he doesn’t even know how.
*Why on earth is the editor in chief of the Manhattan Argus so mad about his lack of a Hudsucker story when his paper has run three cover stories already? Why are there so many Hudsucker cover stories? While Hudsucker Industries is very important in the film’s universe it’s frankly strange that a newspaper, even a business-focussed one (which we don’t know if it is) would give its new CEO consecutive cover stories day after day. When Steve Jobs died I distinctly do not recall three consecutive cover stories on Tim Cook in the Wall Street Journal.
**45th… well you know by now.