Thoughts on laugh tracks in sitcoms.

I've never minded a laugh track and still don't mind it...

 

For people with absolutely no sense of humor though, it's a godsend.

 

Doesn't bother me one way or another.

 

I detest it, any show with one that I like, it’s in spite of the laugh track.

 

I remember the first season of Bullwinkle, when it was still Rocky and His Friends, had a laugh track too. As a kid I assumed people were actually watching the show and reacting.

 

abhor them.

and if there is word more intense than 'abhor', then i do that.

 

I wish I had a laugh track I could trigger throughout the day. I think people might appreciate me more.

 

Hmm, nope in fact Mexican sitcoms have by far the worst laugh tracks in the world. It sounds like a laugh on a loop that they simply fade up and down. All part of the charm, IMHO. I grew up in west Texas and these ridiculous things were always on the stations just across the boarder.



dan c

 

I just triggered one .. you’re good as gold now!

 

The Patty Duke Show had a very particular set of laughers. There was this one girl in the crowd whose canned laugh jumped out at me every time it was used.

I’ll catch shows on AntennaTV and MeTv from time to time, and am surprised when I see that some sitcoms would go without the laugh track in some episodes. Hazel, My Mother The Car and Hogan’s Heroes all have eps with no laugh track.

When I was a kid I assumed that there was just one model of laugh track machine which was the standard across the television industry, because canned laughs always sounded pretty much the same from show to show to me. I sometimes wondered what those people were actually, originally laughing at, and if any of them were still alive (I figured the track had probably been recorded many years earlier). Strange to imagine the ghosts of people laughing at stuff they’d never live to see.

Sitcoms from the 80’s strike me as using the laugh track machine most egregiously. The biggest laughs for the least funny jokes.

 

With Hazel, I seem to think the original network prints for those episodes had the laugh tracks.

It’s odd to watch because when you expect a laugh, there’s always a delay in the action and a pause before anyone reacts, silently. Whitney Blake just shrugs, grins, and shakes her head.

 

There are phone apps for that and no, I'm not joking.

 

Not a laugh track per se, but there's an episode of "The Honeymooners" (I don't know the episode title)where Ralph and Ed are on rollerskates and there's this woman in the audience and you can just hear her saying "Steady... Steady now..." and that annoys me more than any laugh tracks I've heard.

 

It seems to be an American Phenomenon. All the British comedy's had real genuine audiences reacting to them, Are You Being Served, Last of the Summer Wine, Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Benny Hill Show, The Two Ronnies etc....

Occasionally in the british shows you can spot the odd dubbed in laugh, but that's mostly when they need to cover up an abrupt edit piece.

 

The worse the show is the louder the laugh tracks are.

 

The Big Bang Theory. I do not find that show funny one iota. A friend of mine who is a big fan said to me it was because "i didn't get it" meaning the characters' undertone & milieu. My response was that corny, predictable humour topped with average acting accompanied by a perpetual eight second interval laugh track makes for a very less than average sitcom. As for "getting it" concerning the characters undertone, milieu and personalities it doesn't take rocket science (pun intended) or a lengthy analyze in my case to identify banality when I see it.

For those who love this show, I'm not criticizing your opinions or choices. I'm strictly speaking about mine. The topic is about laugh tracks so I'll finish with the main topic : as I stated earlier in my post, TBBT appears to have a non-stop laugh track. I never actually timed it but my guess is that the show averages a laugh track every eight seconds minimum.

 

Hate laugh tracks. We were lucky in the UK and we got MASH shown here without the laugh track.

 

I don't mind laugh tracks if used in moderation and is not distracting. I can't stand the over-the-top laugh tracks where, in addition to normal laughing, the "audience" hoots and hollers or shouts "Ooooooooooh!" in unison when a character makes some kind of "attitude" remark or reveals something to another character they weren't supposed to or something. Also, when the "audience" goes into a fit of righteous shouts of "You go girl!" type of approval when one character "tells off" another who "had it coming".

Fox sitcoms during the 90s seemed to amp up the trend for a lot of this kind of overkill.

 

Laugh tracks, when used sparingly, can be effective at making the overall enjoyment of the show greater. But, if you have to have laughter, better to have a live studio audience doing it in real time to the scenes. If you have a new(er) sitcom playing in the background and not watching it, you can almost get a sense of when the "laughs" will kick in, without even hearing the dialogue. Though not a laugh "track", All in the Family had (I think) the best and most spontaneous laughter. The funnier the dialogue and/or scene, the more contagious the laughter. I don't think (for that show at least) the audience was instructed to laugh at anything in particular. If it was funny, you could judge from the audience reaction.

 

How else would we have known whether to chuckle or bust a gut?

 

Damn straight! MASH without the laugh track is fantastic. I remember once during one of the BBC2 reruns in the early 90's they showed an episode with the laugh track on it.

It was disgusting. I remember we sat stoney faced through the whole thing. It was like something pure had been sullied.

I caught 2 minutes of Two Broke Girls a few days ago and that has to have had a laugh button guy in a booth -

Girl1 - Hi how are you?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Girl2 - Oh I'm fine!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Girl1 - Did you get that letter from the bank?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

and so on.

My fave audience laughter bit is in BlackAdder 2 during the drinking competition the fat monk runs in about to puke and you hear someone go "Oh my God!"

 

Laughter from an actual studio audience is usually good, especially when moments are hilariously funny and the crowd erupts (there are a few of those in Seinfeld). There is also that moment in All in the Family where Edith escapes from a man trying to rape her and the live crowd goes absolutely bananas with cheers. Makes the moment that much more awesome.

A laugh track often sucks because it sounds so fake and there are no nuances to it. To go back to the All in the Family, in the episode where Beverly dies, the moment when the doctor tells Archie, Edith and Barnie that he just passed, you can hear a member of the audience let out an audible, "ooooohhh." That kind of real reaction just adds to the moment.

On the flip side, sometimes a crowd misses the mark and laughs when they shouldn't. The Friends episode where Joey moved out (season 2, I think) is very dramatic, and when he leaves, he comes back a few second later and gives Chandler a heartfelt hug from behind, and in what was a very tender, dramatic moment, the crowd laughs for about two seconds before they obviously figure out that it was not meant to be funny and they quickly shut up.

 

The better the writing the less I mind the laugh-track. I also have heard about the professional laughers planted in the studio audiences, so you can't get away from it even with a live audience.

 

As per Kevin Levine, a Cheers writer...



Splat asks :
I have some rather anal questions about the "Cheers is filmed before a live studio audience" announcement.

a) What prompted it?
b) Was there some rule about which actor would introduce each episode?

We were getting complaints from viewers who thought we were leaning on the laugh track too hard. They didn’t believe that the laughs were real (which they were). So the decision was made to tell the viewers that the show was filmed in front of a live studio audience. Of course the complaints continued. People still didn’t believe that the laughs were genuine (which they were).

There was no rule as to which actor voiced it from week to week. They all recorded the disclaimer and the post production guys just rotated them I guess.

 

I admit the concept is rather phony, but having known them my entire life, they do not bother me.

I have been part of the "Live Studio Audience" a few times and they all began with some local, unknown comedian who would instruct us to how laugh during the show and then proceeded to do a half hour routine to loosen everyone up. It got you in the mood.