Maybe I’m getting really old or else been out of the USA for 
too long, but wasn’t this academy award nominated film about a junkie grandfather, a teenage boy living out a vow of silence, a strip tease pubescent beauty contestant, a suicidal French scholar, his self-help brother-in-law, and a mother whose only real character trait is her smoking cigarettes meant to be funny?
Tobacco product placement. Ha ha?
All six supposedly dysfunctional family members on a road trip in a equally fucked-up VW camper. Ha ha?
Not one, but then I’m sure if I went to the theater in New York there would be people tittering about the metaphor of this voyage in relation to the State of the Union, only tittering is not laughter.
The Performance Garage in New York was tres tres avant-garde 
and the director won a MacArthur Grant, meaning she’s very intelligent. During the shows a few members of the audience would titter as if they were privy to an insider joke or their theater companion had farted, however I never got it and when I asked my friend who starred in the cerebral productions, “What does it mean?” he would offer the Sphinx-like reply, “It means what it means.”
Nothiing or everything.
I opted for the nothing, yet continue to attend their shows hoping for enlightenment. Nirvana never dawned on my head and now I live in a city that’s the antithesis of intelligence.
Pattaya.
But I do laugh at some of the things I see here.
Like girls SMS-texting while riding motorcyces, straight men with lady boys, fat men with really skinny girls, and drunken elephants. Now that’s funny.