TV shows with excessive canned laughter

Not to mention the James L. Brooks honk.

 

They pretty much all do it (tradition), and/or have professional laughers during taping or sweetening in post-production, some are just more subtle and/or secretive (even amongst key crew members) than others.

Regarding ‘I Love Lucy’, you can hear off-camera chuckles from Arnaz and Vance.
I remember one episode in particular during a non-dialogue hair-brained ‘Lucy moment’ where a woman’s voice can be heard spelling out for us (regarding Lucy) ‘Oh she’s gonna do ‘such and such’.

Many times Marilu Henner can be heard off-camera in ‘Taxi’.

The DVD show’s ‘The Return Of Happy Spangler’ (IIRC) blatantly pinched/blended in various spots the laugh track from either an old ‘Jack Benny’ or ‘Burns & Allen’ TV show episode which included one unique laugher, in various versions of it.

There was a female laugher who could be heard on an episode of ‘Mad About You’ (The Ride Home) who's laugh I also heard elsewhere on several different series.

Regarding writer and/or producer James L. Brooks, he could be dubbed as a multi-tasking ‘sweetener’, whether or not that was the first time he ever heard/read (doubtful) lines or not…job security. Audience laughs, viewers of the show may laugh...see ya' next season(?).

I know a writer for a successful TV show which lasted over six seasons, whose laugh could be heard constantly throughout, especially after a risqué comeback that may be a little to ahead of it’s time for some viewers.

Then they have the fake/canned ‘sympathy’ reactions, pronounced as an elongated ‘awe’ (…2-3-4), especially when someone reveals something non-mainstream about their character.

 

The first few episodes of Whitney overused the laugh track. Then they found their footing and it turned terrific.

Sadly it only lasted two seasons. Far, far better than Whitney Cummings other show, Two Broke Girls.

 

Sitcoms are insufferable. This is one of the reasons, but not the only one.

 

That part of one episode that one time sure left a strong impression on you. Powerful stuff. Imagine how broken you might be if you had finished that one episode that one time.

 

Married… with Children had this problem, too, and at times the actors seemed annoyed by it.

 

I hate laughter, canned or live, on sitcoms. Let me decide what is funny, which is rare these days. In fact, I don't watch any current comedies. Sometimes I'll catch a "Big Bang Theory" rerun, but the laugh track just kills it for me. I have the complete seasons of "Frasier" on DVD, and I wish one of the options was to mute the laugh track!

 

I don't mind canned laughter. Sometimes it helps the shows.

 

This is another one of the great things about 30 Rock. No laugh track. I don't need any help deciding when to start Lizzing.

 

The Addams Family...sometimes quite overpowering...

 

Atleast it was funny, unlike Friends.

 

maybe he was 'on a break'

man, the friends hate...i don't get it. not my favorite show but it has its moments had a good run....things got a little stale by the end but....decent build up to Seinfeld. i never really noticed the laugh tracks....i think im immune to them

 

That's the great thing about most U.K. shows. The laugh's are genuine, although I've seen the odd episode of Man About The House/George & Mildred/Robin's Nest where they've nicked an audience reaction from one of Benny Hill's shows, but it's generally all genuine.

 

Seriously though, I'd be sure never to miss an episode.

*protagonist gets down from his lawnmower, takes odd his sunglasses and lights a cigarette*
*some kind of western music starts playing*

"Friends... the moles are back in town."

 

I'd probably comatose.

 

I'm pretty sure MASH was shown in the UK without the laughter track. I could be wrong here but that is my memory of it.

 

I don't like Friends but it was filmed in front of a live audience. I read somewhere that they had to actually reduce the laughter at some points as it was taking too long for the actors to be able to speak the next lines. So they would cut the laughter shorter and maybe have to fly in some audience noise to cover up the join. I'm sure Vidiot will know more about this and some of the tricks of the trade.

 

Fawlty Towers was filmed in front of a live audience and to mix things up between takes John Cleese would alternate various different ways of inflicting phsycial abuse on poor old Andrew Sachs playing the long suffering Manuel. This would keep the audience amused and the laughter fresh.
I'm sure though there was one case where they had to use a laughter track as the BBC had somehow invited in an audience full of non-english speakers who sat bemused through the full show. Cleese maybe mentions this on one of the DVD commentaries, can't remember now...

 

Also there is the bit in Fawlty Towers in the Gourmet Night episode when Basil is frantically trying to get the inebriated Chef to tell him what to do with a starter and the Chef throws up all over it. There is a cutaway so you don't see the act, just the reaction, on the episode itself but clearly from the audience reaction something comes out... you can see the actor who plays the Chef is holding something in there... Again, from memory, I think Cleese did think about altering the audience reaction as he thought it might seem a bit over the top given what they were showing in the released version but decided to leave it in anyway.

 

"Hazel". I mean, its clearly a drama. Did they think 'laughter' would make the show 'easier' to watch?

 

The Twilight Zone episode "Cavender Is Coming". Any laughter at all would be out of place on that one.

 

OTT canned laughter is de rigueur in all American comedies. Providing what has been scripted is mildly amusing, I can detune to it fairly easily. Its been staple for most of my life growing up watching American TV shows.

Where is does grate on the nerves is when it isn't funny. Friends is always the one-two punch, whereby the 1st line is delivered and therefore the 2nd line has to be some kind of humorous punchline. Unlike the show Two and a Half Men, where every line has canned laughter, and sorry US folks this program just isn't funny. How Charlie earned nearly $million per episode is the funniest thing about the show.

 

I think the "comedy" aspect of the show almost entirely revolved around Hazel's voice and facial expressions.

 

HAAHAHAHAAAHAHAAAHAAHAHAHA

 

We had at least two or three minute-long laughs in Will & Grace over seven seasons, and those had to be cut down to maybe 10 seconds at most. In some cases, the audience kept going nuts and so the crew had to wait for the audience to go home, then they came back and did pick-ups with an empty studio so they could get the lines and reactions clean. I've worked on more than 45 sitcoms over the years, and I never saw reactions bigger than the Will & Grace crowds.

A sitcom is a hodge-podge of pre-shoots (scenes shot prior to shoot day, without an audience, often on location or with an unusual set), the dress rehearsal (which sometimes has a full audience but more often has just a smattering of people, including all the writers and producers and friends, to provide some laughter for timing purposes), the actual show (with a full live audience), and then pickups at the end to fix mistakes, move the cameras in closer, or otherwise get a shot or an angle that would be impossible during the real show. Only the real show has what I'd call "honest laughs." All the laughs you hear nowadays are actually from the real show, but they might be "cut and pasted in" from a different scene. If the audience has heard a joke four or five times before, they're never going to laugh as hard as they did the first time, so I see no harm in using the initial response if it was honestly earned.

The problem is that there's pressure from the network to have constant laughs all the way through, so a minor line that deserves only a chuckle gets a guffaw, a big joke gets a massive roar, and then a huge punch-line gets a nuclear explosion. They rarely know how to lighten up.