Joe Palca - Annoying

The unkempt Madison offers to share his apartment with pressed-and-creased Ungar after his marriage collapses, but it’s immediately clear that bachelorhood is about the only thing these two have in common. Ungar offers to do a little “tidying up” after one of Madison’s poker games has left the apartment a total mess. When the sportswriter wakes up the next morning, the apartment looks like it’s ready for a photo shoot with House Beautiful , the previous night’s bacchanalia a distant memory.

At first, the transformation is pleasing. Even the rumpled Madison enjoys the laundry service and the home-cooked meals that Ungar is happy to provide. After a while, though, the constant dusting and tidying and spraying with air freshener get to be too much. Madison launches into a tirade. “I can’t take it anymore, Felix, I’m cracking up,” says Oscar. “Everything you do irritates me. And when you’re not here, the things I know you’re gonna do when you come in irritate me. You leave me little notes on my pillow. I told you 158 times I can’t stand little notes on my pillow. ‘We’re all out of cornflakes. F.U.’ Took me three hours to figure out F.U. was Felix Ungar!” Unger takes all of this in but is equally annoyed by Oscar’s lack of appreciation for his efforts.

Felix Ungar: I put order in this house. For the first time in months, you’re saving money. You’re sleeping on clean sheets. You’re eating hot meals for a change, and I did it.

Oscar Madison: Yes, that’s right. And then at night after we’ve had your halibut steak and your tartar sauce, I have to spend the rest of the evening watching you Saran Wrap the leftovers.

He shakes his head when Madison finishes his tirade with a complaint about the plate of pasta Unger made for their dinner.

Oscar Madison: Now kindly remove that spaghetti from my poker table. [ Felix laughs. ]

Oscar Madison: [What] the hell’s so funny?

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.”