I had this same issue.

Using the webkit inspector I can see that Highcharts binds a click event to the chart container (the div with the 'highcharts-container' class), and this seems to interfere with clicking.

Provided you don't want any of the functionality in that click event, you can remove it by setting 

chart.container.onclick = null;

Otherwise, you'll need to use the built-in highcharts event properties to set your callbacks.
As the OP noted, there is an 'events' property for the chart object, which should trigger when clicking the plot background. 
There is also an event property for the plot options which triggers when clicking the series itself. 

For example, for area plots:

var chart = new Highcharts.Chart({
    ...
    plotOptions: {
        area: {
            events: {
                click: function(event) {
                    // do something
                }
            },
        ...
        }
    }
    ...
});


More more info see:
http://www.highcharts.com/ref/#plotOptions-area-events

highcharts: stop chart from trapping mouse events, or capture mouse click on the ENTIRE chart
Now that we know what is in store for c#5, there is apparently still an opening for us to influence the choice of the two new keywords for 'Asynchrony' that were announced by Anders Heijsberg yesterday at PDC10.

async void ArchiveDocuments(List&lt;Url&gt; urls) {
    Task archive = null;
    for(int i = 0; i &lt; urls.Count; ++i) {
        var document = await FetchAsync(urls[i]);
        if (archive != null)
            await archive;
        archive = ArchiveAsync(document);
    }
}


Eric Lippert has an explanation of the choice of the current two keywords, and the way in which they have been misunderstood in usability studies. The comments have several other propositions.

Please - one suggestion per answer, duplicates will be nuked.
