The audience laughed at the many lines degrading Indian Americans, like “Don’t ever to try to sell an Indian… You get those names come up, you ever get ‘em, ‘Patel’?… Never bought a f—ing thing… A supercilious race…”
They laughed when “fairy” was lobbed as another insult, and at the mention of “Polacks.” The laughter was of the simplest kind—it was at that insult or slur, those people (including a later mention of “wog”).
It was not nervous or derisive laughter. It was literal laughter, a mirror response to how the words were originally written and intended for the characters who said them, and how they are being faithfully spoken by the actors in…