Layers of Laughter in The Lobster

Imagine you live in a world where you are single. Maybe by choice, maybe due to bad luck, but in this world, being single means you are placed in a hotel for forty-five days to find a romantic partner or be turned into an animal. You get to choose which one, but regardless, the outcome is the same. It’s a fate that feels both unsettling and strange. Because as a result of not having a partner, you as a human in your high-functioning self will be punished to somehow morph and change identity to embody a creature’s body. Thinking about this already raises goosebumps up my spine, not out of fear, but out of discomfort. 

The Lobster (2015) by Yorgos Lanthimos makes you not only think about this but live through it alongside a young man who fails to find love and escapes to the rebel group that aims to overthrow this structure. Things only get much, much weirder from here, and yet you still leave the film laughing. Through this, The Lobster shows how discomfort and extreme absurdity can create humor by using disturbing situations and awkwardness to satirize society’s expectations for relationships, forcing us to confront how we participate in maintaining them.

Have you ever pretended to like something in order to impress another person? Well, this film turns that idea on its head by suggesting that people with similar afflictions make great matches. One example is John, who fakes nosebleeds to make a woman who always gets nosebleeds fall in love with him. The film presents this as macabrely as one can imagine by showing him slamming his head against the bathroom sink until he bleeds. He later explains his self-destructive behavior in a manner that seems completely rational, saying that he has to do it in order to make their relationship seem real. The actual thought of someone bashing their head and slowly tearing apart their nose cartilage just to woo another person sounds horrifying, yet the film delivers this alongside flat dialogue and monotone reactions. This response does nothing to repair or rationalize the horrors we’ve witnessed, but rather makes it worse—and yet we laugh, exactly because it makes no sense.

The theme of disturbance continues in the stage demonstrations that take place at the hotel, where the hotel staff show the dangers of being single to the guests. In one presentation, a woman is sitting and then is suddenly strangled and choked to death by a random man. Another presents a woman walking by herself through the woods before being attacked. The reason for these incidents is calmly explained by the presenter: they had no partner to rescue them. Although these scenes are disturbing in their accuracy to the real-world violence women face when alone in public, the way they are explained through this extreme passivity is comedic simply because of how unexpected it is. It is true that being alone can be dangerous, but the length to which the film exaggerates that and then twists it to seem like something completely normal confuses us in a way where one can’t help but feel amused.

One of the funniest moments in the film for me was when the main character David tries to gain the approval of a heartless woman by brutally kicking a little girl. Yes, kicking a little girl. If one ever saw that in real life one would probably scream and run away or cry. It is hard to even imagine. But in the film, the way the girl’s dad reacts—without any anger or upset but instead consoling her that she will have a limp like her dad—makes the whole thing seem so far-fetched and removed from reality that we feel comfortable with appreciating its humor. 

Similarly, characters are rewarded for hunting the escaped singles in the forest, a reality not far from The ​​Hunger Games, but the movie’s juxtaposition of this terrifying notion with the way the characters treat it like a fun casual outing causes us to laugh rather than cry. And matters become more absurd when one of the guests in the hotel masturbates and is punished by the hotel management, who force his hand into a toaster. This moment is grotesque, but the way the other characters react to it with complete blankness, as if it were perfectly normal, takes the moment from disgusting to utterly strange.

The Lobster makes us laugh because it takes relatable ideas and expectations, presents them in extremely exaggerated and graphic ways, and then has everyone in the film act as if they aren’t. The expectations are all real: finding someone to protect you, having shared interests, and not masturbating so that you are encouraged to find real love. But the film pushes them to their extreme with propaganda, violence, and even plain abuse, and this combined with a set of characters that seem unbothered and completely okay with it causes the disturbance to feel oddly safe to chuckle at.

But should we really be laughing? It is easy to laugh at something that feels fake. We know that this isn’t real, that this isn’t happening in our world; it is all mediated by a screen. But is it? The elements may be exaggerated, but they are all true. People expect you to find someone compatible who shares your interests and look down on those who fail to do so. This raises the question: are we really laughing at the movie or at ourselves and the role we are playing in upholding these expectations? In the end, we as a society act as both the enforcers and the victims, encouraging these rules but also suffering from them. I think that is what the film wants us to realize: that yes, it is funny to watch someone make their nose bleed, but why is that funny? Because we do the same thing listening to Lil Wayne even though we hate rap music,  because of the idea that shared interests are a necessary part of a relationship. We are both the expectations and the people who uphold them. Although you personally may not have created this cycle, you are still a part of it; we all are. We think we laugh at the movie, but it is really the movie that is laughing at us.