ABSTRACT
In film-philosophical debates concepts like atmosphere, mood, and Stimmung have in recent years gained considerable traction. What has received decidedly less attention is the relation of these terms to collective or even shared emotions. By drawing on the example of comedies and laughter in the cinema, this chapter shows that atmospheres and shared emotions can have significant mutual influence. In particular, the chapter argues that an audience shares the emotion of being amused when it focuses on the same intentional object (the comedy) and responds to it in an immediate way with some mutual awareness and some form of phenomenological closeness. Here laughter can be an obvious means of making viewers mutually aware and “binding” them together. Examples of this can be found in contagious forms of laughter—as the most straightforward emotional expression of being amused—which can create a light-hearted atmosphere that was neither existent beforehand nor intended by the filmmakers. The chapter also explores these themes in cases of “conversion laughter,” in which the expression of amusement laughter occasions the evaluative transformation of a film that was meant seriously and is now being laughed at collectively.
