Annoying

Felix Ungar: It’s not spaghetti, it’s linguini. [Oscar picks up the linguini and hurls it against the kitchen wall.]

Oscar Madison: Now it’s garbage.

The movie is a classic. It’s hilarious. Yet both characters are, in their own ways, totally annoying. Who would want to watch annoying characters for two hours?

Tom Schulman has an explanation. Schulman is a successful screenwriter. His credits include Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Dead Poets Society. In order to write successful movies, screenwriters have to get into the heads of their characters. They capture the essence of human behaviors and translate them to the screen. So, because the academic world of psychology has largely dropped the ball when it comes to understanding what we find annoying, people like Schulman may be able to offer some ideas.

“Normally, when we’re annoyed with people, we’re not allowed to express it,” says Schulman, “especially in public.” Take the experience of sitting on an airplane behind a small child. The child keeps popping his head over the back of the seat, hoping for a game of peek-a-boo. Schulman says this is cute for a while, but he likes to read on airplanes, so the Jack-in-the-box in front of him is an irritating distraction.

“Everybody’s watching, and I can’t act annoyed,” he says. “But in the movie I can laugh when the character gets annoyed.” So when Oscar Madison gets annoyed at Felix Ungar in The Odd Couple or when Oliver Hardy gets annoyed at Stan Laurel in the Laurel and Hardy movies or when everyone gets annoyed at Newman on Seinfeld or when Jackie Gleeson gets annoyed with Art Carney in The Honeymooners, we laugh. We can sympathize with the circumstances that are making the character annoyed, and we can laugh because it’s not happening to us.

Schulman has written a movie with precisely those qualities. It’s called What about Bob? and it may be the most rigorous investigation of annoyingness and annoyance ever performed. Bill Murray plays Bob Wiley, a man who is afraid of almost everything. He carries a tissue to open doors because he doesn’t want to risk getting germs from the doorknob. He walks up forty flights of stairs because he’s too scared to get into an elevator.

Richard Dreyfuss plays Leo Marvin, a self-important psychotherapist who agrees to take Bob on as a patient. Leo is calm, in charge, and the master of his universe. For Bob, in contrast, everything in the world is a challenge.

Dr. Leo Marvin: Are you married?

Bob Wiley: I’m divorced.

Dr. Leo Marvin: Would you like to talk about that?

Bob Wiley: There are two types of people in this world: Those who like Neil Diamond, and those who don’t. My ex-wife loves him.

Dr. Leo Marvin: [pause] I see. So, what you’re saying is that even though you are an almost-paralyzed, multiphobic personality who is in a constant state of panic, your wife did not leave you, you left her because she… liked Neil Diamond?

Unlike The Odd Couple, the annoyance in What about Bob? is asymmetric. In this case, Bob loves Leo. Leo detests Bob. After their initial meeting, Leo tells Bob that he’s going away for summer vacation and will meet with him again after Labor Day. Bob is unhinged by this. He needs round-the-clock access to his shrink.

So Bob manages to track down Leo on vacation and wheedles his way into Leo’s life. “The Richard Dreyfuss character is a control freak,” says Schulman, which has a lot to do with why he finds Bob so annoying. He tries to get rid of Bob, and he can’t. “The things that annoy us most are the things that we can’t control. I find I’m most annoyed by things when I am in the most controlling of moods.”

Schulman says, yes, Bob is annoying. His quirky behavior would make him impossible to live with. His neediness is cloying. He is not someone you’d want to have around for very long. “I think that’s true of a lot of movie characters,” says Schulman. If people like Bob were in our living rooms, “we wouldn’t tolerate them for a second. But on the screen, we root for them because we find the other character they’re up against more distasteful.”

Schulman says that you have to be careful, though. You don’t want to make your annoying character too annoying. He recalls the reaction of the first person who read the script at the studio. “She said, ‘I hate this character Bob. Who would want to spend any time around him, much less watch him for two hours on the screen?’” Schulman says he was taken aback.

“I hadn’t really thought of that, because I found him somehow lovable in spite of that.” More evidence, as if any were needed, that the perception of what’s annoying is very subjective. It’s a fine line. What about Bob? was a successful movie, but there are people who absolutely agreed with that woman at the studio. For those people, it’s not only that Bob is unrelentingly annoying, it’s that some of us will identify with the character he is tormenting. Leo Marvin may be uptight, but it’s hard for some of us to watch him be emotionally eviscerated by Bob.

Screenwriter Mark Silverstein says that to avoid stepping over the too-annoying line, it helps if the characters’ annoying behaviors are familiar. “You should recognize someone you know, you should recognize things you do,” says Silverstein. He and his writing partner Abby Kohn constructed the character Gigi Phillips for a movie they cowrote called He’s Just Not That into You. Phillips is looking for love but does it in a way that puts off potential candidates.

For example, Gigi manages to go on a date with a guy who is commitment-phobic. Gigi, on the other hand, “is already talking about her four-year plan,” says Kohn, “and where she wants to get married and that she’d like to have a summer house, and they could just like leave their parkas there in the winter and leave their bathing suits there in the summer, and this is where they’re going to vacation.”

To the guy, Gigi is an irritating nightmare, says Kohn. Yet her yearning for love and marriage makes her sympathetic. “I think in that way, if you set up a dynamic like that, you can amuse your audience by how much your character is annoying your other character,” says Kohn.

In watching that dynamic, Kohn says you can learn more about the character of the annoyee than the annoyer. She says that this realization came from her real-life relationship with Silverstein. They work together in a comfortable office near Hollywood. It’s not a large office, though, and they’re both in the same room. She says it annoys her when Marc looks over her shoulder while she’s writing something. Marc then becomes the annoyer, while she is the annoyee.

“Why is that annoying to me? Is it annoying because I feel him breathing on my neck? Yeah, that’s annoying,” says Kohn. “Is it annoying because he’s too close? Maybe. But maybe what’s annoying is I don’t quite know the right line yet, and so I’m deleting it five, six, seven times, so I don’t want him to read the crappy version before I get it right.”

Kohn says that her annoyance comes from her fear that Marc will think less of her for writing crappy versions, but she realizes that annoying behavior can also teach you something about the annoyer. “Cracking your knuckles or talking in a high voice are symptoms of insecurity,” she says. “You’re nervous, your voice goes up. You’re nervous, you start cracking your knuckles. You’re nervous, and you tell the same four jokes.”

There are also some actors who simply cannot be made annoying onscreen, and that’s part of what makes them such successful movie stars, says Silverstein. “Tom Hanks or Julia Roberts, those sort of people. You love them, whatever they’re doing.” Silverstein says that if you cast Hanks or Roberts as a character who does unlikable things or who is mean to people, the audience will either forgive them or conclude that they must have a good reason for acting so mean.

Sometimes annoying behaviors depicted onscreen can have positive benefits in real life. For example, there’s one scene in What about Bob? where Bob has weaseled his way into a dinner with Leo Marvin’s family at their vacation home. “Bob is making all kinds of ‘this is so good’ noises,” says screenwriter Tom Schulman. “And that just pushes Marvin over the edge.” It doesn’t sound annoying, but the noises are so excessive and unrelenting that even though they are positive, they become annoying. “That was a habit my wife had, being that demonstrative about the food she was enjoying,” Schulman says. “It cured my wife of that habit when she saw