When Lethal Weapon first came out, I went to see it with a friend of mine. It was a packed house.
The setup scene for the plot has a young, scantily clad woman doing drugs and then taking a dive off the balcony, falling a ridiculously long time before crashing dramatically onto the roof of a car, followed by dead silence. It was very dramatic. Into which dramatic silence my friend yells “8.5.” The whole theatre was laughing enough that we missed the first half of the next scene.
When the Passion of the Christ trailer was making it’s rounds in the theatres my friend and I thought it was fair game to have an out loud converstaion.
“Jesus Christ, what is this film?”
“Jesus Christ, it’s in subtitles.”
“Jesus Christ, not Mel Gibson!”
I’ve been holding back telling this, as you need to be familiar with the play to understand it (familiar enough to know that no Nazis appear on stage, anyway), but for those few:
I played Van Daan in a production of this. At one point, he’s upset with Anne, and asks her “Why can’t you be nice and quiet like your sister Margot?” Early in rehearsals, our Otto Frank piped up: “Margot’s been fixed!”
It was about even money right up to opening night whether I’d be able to deliver the line without the entire cast cracking up.
(I did, and we didn’t…)
Thanks a bunch, Sam A. Robrin for reviving this thread. I almost bumped it myself but decided just to link to it in the new thread about “movies with rowdy audiences.”
Is this zombie worth a bump at this late date? 
Starting a new thread with a link to this one seems such a waste…
I just had to see where it was that the “hey diddle diddle” idea came up. By now there must be dozens of updates. If not, newcomers may get a chuckle anyway.
Seeing “Klute” around 1973 when Jean Stapleton appeared on screen, people in my college yelled 'Dingbat!" in honor of her “All in the Family” character.
I see I didn’t use this one six years ago.
In A Cold Day in the Park Sandy Dennis plays an “older” woman (32 or something) who invites a young hunky drifter in. He is very soulful. He has a harmonica. Somehow she winds up blindfolded, and he toots on the harmonica to lead her to him. When I saw it, at school, someone had brought a harmonica and added his own solo.
Not so iconic, but at the 1970 Boskone they showed a movie from Australia in the style of the old serials, about the “Master Duper” who made copies of movies. gasp
The evil machine that he was going to use to torture the hero was a washing machine size multimeter. When the villain went to it to set it to the right torture program, Isaac Asimov called out “Set it to ohms!”
Damnation Alley - The heroes pull into (I think) Salt Lake City in their souped-up tank and are soon pursued by man eating cockroaches. My brother’s friend gives us The Wink and starts scratching furiously, hollering Get 'em OFF me! I look around, the whole theatre is scratching.
Star Wars (IV) - My friend and I are trading off quips all through it–fifth time we’d seen it:
“Mos Eisley spaceport: You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” Friend: It’s good to be home.
Cantina Band sequence: the first alien in the bar pops up on camera, I say, “Look, it’s our English teacher.”
Luke is about to swing across the Death Star chasm, carrying the Princess. She kisses him for luck. Friend: Ooo, the Force is within ME!
Back in the '70s, I lived in Cambridge, England for a time. On weekends, the cinema on Market Square would show a double feature starting at midnight. There was always a full house, and of course it was usually made up of inebriated college students.
One night, the first movie was The Beguiled with Clint Eastwood, set during the American Civil War. In it, he plays a wounded Union soldier who winds up hiding from the Confederates in a girls’ school, i.e., an antebellum mansion.
At one point, he gets knocked down a flight of stairs in the middle of the night and breaks his leg. The girls pick him up and put him on the dining room table, unconscious.
The headmistress stands over him in her nightgown with her hair hanging loose. She’s holding a candle and lets the light fall on Clint’s compound fracture. The camera zooms in for a particularly graphic shot of the leg.
“Oh, dear!” says the headmistress in her finest Southern matron voice. “We’re going to have to amputate!”
The hot black slave girl standing immediately behind her says in her best Southern darkie voice, “Does that mean you gonna cut his leg off?”
This was the only time I ever heard a room explode with laughter. I thought the roof was going to blow off! Everyone in the cinema was laughing so hard and so loud you couldn’t hear a word the actors were saying for the next five minutes.
Finally, someone in the audience piped up:
[English accent]: No, we’re gonna cut his head off!
They also often have those people blacked out in a scene and you guess who they are. I almost always will say out loud “Otm Shank - he’s the Indian Brian Dennehey” I am always pleased if a few people catch on.
At work it had been the tradition of our group to buy our screenings of the Lord of the Rings films when they first released. I had a manager that didn’t really like fantasy or sci fi. So we finally get around to Return of the King and he’s pretty happy because he never has to see another of these. We watch the movie and then it ends. Then there’s the 2nd ending…and the third…
When the 4th ending starts up he yells out “OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE!” and walked out of the theater.
Back when I was in college, I went to a showing of Creature from the Black Lagoon on cinema night. At one point in the movie, the protagonists were sailing up a river in South America on a boat named Rita.
Someone in the audience immediately piped up in her best Latino voice, “R-r-r-r-r-iiiiii-ta! R-r-r-r-r-iiiii-ta!” Boisterous laughter ensued!
On another occasion, I went to a movie night at the University of Minnesota; this time, I was the one who was drunk as a skunk.
The program that night was classic TV shows of the 1950s (e.g., Amos ‘n’ Andy, Leave It to Beaver).
By the time they got to The Adventures of Superman, I was really caught up in it, reliving my childhood. Watching the intro to Superman, it all started coming back to me:
*"Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!
Look! Up in the sky!
It’s a bird!
It’s a plane!
It’s SUPERMAN!
Superman, strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men!
Superman, who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend iron in his bare hands, and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper,
fights a never-ending battle for TRUTH, JUSTICE, and the AMERICAN WAY!"*
By the time we got to the final paragraph, I was reciting the above out loud. Everyone in the auditorium joined in for the last six words, VERY LOUDLY, and broke into wild cheers and applause!
Every time I’m watching a movie with my daughter and one of the actors delivers a purely expository line like “Oh, but Cousin Woodrow* asked* for you!” I lean over and whisper “Oh, she’s his cousin!” just the way a typical moviegoer would do. It never fails to crack her up!
That is, something **like **“Oh, she’s his cousin!” Other variants have included “Oh, she’s the *real *princess of Tripoli! That’s why he’s helping her!” and “Oh, she’s blind! That’s why she doesn’t see them!”
In “Return of the Jedi,” there’s the scene near the end where that Emperor clown is lightning-ing Luke while Vader looks on. There were three reaction shots of Vader’s “face” and I couldn’t take it any more, I said a bit too loudly Am I supposed to be seeing something on Vader’s "face?"
Not a movie, but in “Star Trek TOS: The Changeling,” something similar happens when Kirk explodes at Nomad, You’re Wrong, and Nomad gets a reaction shot, like Nomad recoiled in disbelief and thought OMG, my life is a lie!. Busts me up every time and I’m actively seeking that out everywhere now.
Latina. :smack:
Remember those Euell Gibbons commercials on TV back in the early 1970’s?
Circa 1973, I went with a group of college students (three male and two female) to a showing of Deep Throat at the local Mitchell Bros. theater in Berkeley. At just the “climactic” moment (one of many in that movie) someone in the audience shouted out:
Many parts are edible!
At another of the “climactic” moments, someone else shouted out:
Tastes like wild hickory nuts!
(You had to be familiar with those Euell Gibbons commercials.)
TV show parodies another TV show without ever (probably?) meaning to:
Circa 1970, in the Co-op (a privately run college rooming house), in the TV room, a group of die-hard Trekkies are watching the evening’s re-run of a Star Trek TOS episode. The station was running those five days a week. Immediately following the Star Trek re-runs, also five days a week, were old Mission Impossible re-runs. Of course, a lot of the same people who watched the Trek re-runs also stayed to watch the Mission Impossible re-runs.
So one episode, Phelps and his crew (including Paris, played by Leonard Nimoy) are at a sidewalk cafe in Paris or some such place. Suddenly, a car drives by at high speed, a gun is seen sticking out the window, and Bang! Bang! Someone who was eating at the cafe is laying on the ground in a pool of blood.
Everyone there leaps to their feet. Phelps is standing to one side, gravely observing the action. Paris leaps into action – dives down to the body, takes its pulse, and then looks up at Phelps and somberly announces:
He’s dead, Jim!Audience in TV room (about 8 of us) are ROTFLOAO.
I’m sure this required multiple takes. Mission was filmed right next door to* TOS*, so everyone was well acquainted with everyone else’s shtick (and Nimoy was the natural replacement for Martin Landau). You can bet everyone on the set broke down in laughter each time Nimoy delivered the line. (He probably encouraged the writers to include it!)
Carroll O’Connor evoked a similar reaction in theaters when he appeared as a Roman senator in a re-release of Cleopatra: “Hey! It’s Archie Bunker! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!”
I remember when John Byner parodied him on Carol Burnett: “Ever lick a river?”
(Euell was a natural foods nut. He plugged Post’s Grape-nuts cereal.)