Joe Palca - Annoying

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 the movie.”

This seems like a lot of work to extinguish an annoying habit in your spouse, but at the same time, you can’t argue with success.

According to University of Louisville psychologist Michael Cunningham, if you want to know why your spouse’s habits drive you nuts—such as being too demonstrative about someone else’s cooking, for example—you should start by thinking about the immune system, particularly allergies.

Allergies are a good example of the immune system gone awry. Dust is nothing more than a nose-tickler for most people, but people with dust allergies will become severely congested, with constant sneezing and reddened eyes. Or take peanuts. Instead of being a tasty snack, to the person with a peanut allergy they become a deadly menace. Or poison ivy. Some people can frolic barefoot in a patch of poison ivy and be no worse off than if they had walked on a shag carpet. For others, all it takes is a sideways look at the distinctive three-leaved plant, and they break out in an incredibly itchy rash. In addition, when the immune system starts to get things wrong, it doesn’t learn from its mistakes. The first exposure to poison ivy can cause a minor rash. Repeated exposure can lead to acute rashes and swelling that may be severe enough to require hospitalization. This heightened reaction with repeated exposure is called sensitization.

Cunningham says that partners are so good at getting under each other’s skin because of behaviors that he calls social allergens: small things that don’t elicit much of a reaction at first can lead to emotional explosions with repeated exposure. This is the unspoken behavior that gets repeated on an occasional basis—sometimes daily, sometimes less frequently—but packs a bigger and bigger punch with the passage of time.

The idea occurred to Cunningham when he was visiting a colleague. They were having an amiable chat when the phone rang. Cunningham’s friend answered the phone, and as the phone conversation progressed, Cunningham watched his friend become agitated. He remained civil, but his face became red. “I could see the irritation, and I knew there must be an issue there.”

When the call ended, Cunningham asked what was up. It turns out that the call was from a graduate student who was writing a research paper with Cunningham’s friend. The student kept neglecting to make a change that his professor had wanted. “There’s nothing more annoying to somebody who is editing a document than to ask for a change and not get it,” says Cunningham.

By itself, the dispute was minor. The first time the student failed to make the correction, the professor may hardly have noticed. The second time the response was a bit stronger.

By the third or fourth time, the failure to make the change was causing the professor to become severely agitated and turn red. The professor was not certain whether the student was passively resisting the revision or simply was not paying attention to the comments written in the margin, but neither possibility conveyed respect for the professor’s time and effort in providing expert feedback.

The parallel with sensitization was clear. Cunningham has now done numerous studies on social allergens, often as they relate to people in romantic relationships. He says there are four basic categories that most social allergens fall into:

1. Uncouth habits . These are behaviors that are not necessarily intended to be annoying but do the trick admirably. Noisy flatulence, nose picking, and knuckle cracking are all examples. Basically, it’s anything that a person does that detracts from your physical or sonic space. It’s not meant to be intentionally annoying, just as the way that someone who blasts his iPod until you can hear it at the other end of the subway car isn’t doing it because he wants to irritate his fellow travelers; he simply likes loud music. “Somebody who plays video games instead of paying attention to the romantic partner who is in the room would also have an uncouth habit,” says Cunningham. “People who wear the same clothing from Friday night all the way through to Sunday and don’t bother taking a shower all weekend might annoy some partners.”

2. Inconsiderate acts . Cunningham says that inconsiderate acts are social allergens that do affect a specific individual, but they aren’t done with the express intention of annoying that person. For example, you’re having a discussion with your partner about a project you find difficult at work. At first, she clucks supportively, but as you explain the nuances of the problem, you notice that she’s checking her BlackBerry for any new e-mails. Or your partner is ready to leave the house because you promised to take her out for dinner, and you say, “I’ll be ready as soon as this inning is over,” and the inning lasts for twenty-five minutes because there are three pitching changes, and she’s left standing by the door. Or your partner says she’ll pick up the dry cleaning, and she forgets, time after time. Or your partner is chronically late for every appointment you make with him. You get the idea.