This Is No Laughing Matter

Last night I was leafing through Neil Zawacki’s book How to Be a Villain (yes, it was a gift; no, it wasn’t from a disgruntled reader who thinks I’m well on my way) and ran across a section titled “The Evil Laugh—A Must-Have.”

Zawacki calls the evil laugh “a defining characteristic of any supervillain,” and suggests that it can be unleashed for any number of occasions, including “When revealing your master plan,” “After pressing the enormous red button of doom” and “In ironic glee just as the heroes are sneaking up from behind.”

But given the dearth of bone-chilling giggles at the movies this year, I wonder whether villainous laughs are as indispensable as they once were—whether they’re becoming a dowdy anachronism of days gone by, like powdered wigs or boom boxes. Are supervillains even bothering to read Zawacki’s book?

The movie I reviewed last night (The Possession) had a horrible, evil, villainous creature who nevertheless laughed at nothing (though she did sing a bit). You’d expect to find some gleeful supervillains in this year’s bevy of superhero flicks. And yet I don’t think any of them let loose even a minor cackle. Sure, Bane from The Dark Knight Rises had a rather dark sense of humor, but he never even laughed at his own jokes. The Lizard from The Amazing Spider-Man, I think, just roared a lot. It’s possible that Loki smirked a time or two in The Avengers. But laugh? He might as well have been balancing his checkbook.

In Brave there were no laughing bears. In The Bourne Legacy, the assassins never let loose with so much as a titter. OK, so maybe the evil queen laughed a time or two in Mirror Mirror, but really: How evil can a laugh from Julia Roberts be?

It wasn’t so long ago that evil laughs proliferated on screen. In 2007, Ratatoulle‘s Anton Ego had one of the greatest gutteral guffaws of all time (according to our blog-writing designer Kevin Simpson). Certainly The Joker from 2008’s The Dark Knight wasn’t above the occasional chilling chortle. Even last year, Chris Cooper’s villainous Tex Richman in The Muppets served up a maniacal laugh to be long remembered: He’d turn to his henchmen and say, repeatedly, “Maniacal laugh. Maniacal laugh. Maniacal laugh.”

But in 2012? To my knowledge, barely a giggle.

Now I could be wrong. I don’t see every movie, of course. And those that I do see, I sometimes forget 30 seconds after I’m finished with my review (and occasionally before). If you can think of any profound evil laughs from 2012 I’ve failed to note, please let me know.

But for now, I’m going with my theory: Villains just don’t laugh like they used to.

So what profound Plugged In sort of point can we make with this cinematic trend? Perhaps we could call this a step in the right direction (Even the bad guys can’t find anything amusing in their evil antics!). Or maybe it’s a sign that the line between the bad guys and good guys is getting ever more blurry. (Cinematic heroes are, as a general rule, rather serious blokes.)

Or perhaps it’s simply a sign that Hollywood, increasingly enamored with special effects and sequels and developing movie plots based on board games, has lost sight of some simple methods of establishing character: The knowing wink, the gallant kiss-of-the-hand, the evil laugh.

Whatever the cause, I kind of miss it. I hope that the next time a cinematic villain suspends a hero above a churning pool of acid filled with electric moray sharks, he’ll see fit to take perverse pleasure in his plot and laugh a little. Because we all know that, after the hero escapes and before the credits roll, he’ll have precious little reason to giggle.