Is lack of trust in their comedy or they really think the public is that dumb they need to know when to laugh?
Or is a by product of its former format, the live laughs with a crowd while filming?
So you’ll know it’s supposed to be funny.
If you’ve ever watched the the videos of the Big Bang Theory sitcom with the laugh tracks removed, you’ll notice it feels a lot more like a group of people being shitty and verbally abusive towards each other and it’s not all that funny without being told to laugh.
Why go through the trouble of writing an actual funny dialogue when you can just tell the viewers it’s funny and they’ll laugh?MASH had a laugh track that the creators hated, but the network insisted on. As a compromise, they agreed not to use the track during surgical scenes.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/56777/why-did-mash-have-laugh-track
If you watch the Canadian version it didn’t have a laugh track. IMO a much better presentation of the show.
Because people watching TV alone are more likely to laugh, and are more likely to rate the show better.
It’s weird, I grew up watching shows with laugh tracks but now they make me cringe. I can watch reruns of those old shows no problem but if I see a new show and it has a laugh track I’m immediately put off.
old shows were more likely to have an actual audience, like friends or seinfeld
We’re social creatures. The laugh track makes us feel like we’re in a social situation. I think different shows use this more or less cynically.
Not sure if my brain just works differently but I’ve always felt isolated by the laugh track. It’s always made me very uncomfortable to watch a show that isn’t funny and hear people that aren’t me laughing and clapping constantly. Makes me feel like I’m being manipulated by aliens into feeling fake joy or something, I hate it.
I believe its a byproduct of originally being filmed in front of a studio
Or is a by product of its former format, the live laughs with a crowd while filming?
This is the reason. Television comedy derives from stage shows where the audience sits in one direction from the stage.
A lot of early television comedy programming was often from variety shows, where the live studio audience is an important feedback mechanism for the actual performers. A standup comic needs a laughing audience to respond to (and often, so do other stage performers, including sketch comedy).
So television comedy comes from that tradition, and a live audience was always included for certain types of programs. Even today, we expect variety shows to have audiences. For example, John Oliver’s show without an audience felt kinda weird while that was going on in 2020. And even some pre-filmed sketch comedy shows, like Chappelle’s Show, would record audiences watching the pre-recorded sketches as part of the audio track for the broadcast itself, while Chappelle himself was filmed essentially MCing for that audience and those sketches.
So sitcoms came up on sets with live performances before studio audiences, just like sketch comedies and variety shows or daytime talk shows. That multi camera sitcom format became its own aesthetic, with three-walled sets that were always filmed from one direction, with a live audience laughing and reacting. Even when they started using closed sets for safety and control (see the Fran Drescher stuff linked elsewhere in this thread), they preserved the look and feel of those types of shows.
Single camera sitcoms are much more popular now, after the 2000’s showed that they could be hilarious, but they are significantly more expensive and complicated to shoot, as blocking and choreography and set design require a lot more conscious choices when the cameras can be anywhere in the room, pointed in any direction. So multi camera still exists.
Also worth noting the canned laughter began with radio programs. The Wikipedia page on laugh tracks has a well detailed explanation on the evolution of this under History In The United States on it’s Laugh Tracks page
They started using laugh tracks back in the 50s, but they became the standard in the 80s due to the attack on Fran Drescher. At that time, sitcoms were still commonly recorded in front of a live studio audience.
In 1985, she and her husband were brutally attacked in their home by two men who had stalked her from a live taping. In response, the studio went to a closed set for security and hired Central Casting “laughers,” that were eventually replaced by a laugh track. Other sitcoms followed suit when studios saw the ratings and cost benefits to a laugh track over taping in front of a live studio audience.
Laugh tracks were extensively used long before the Fran Drescher thing though?
Nearly every show I watched from the 60’s to the early 80’s used them. It was noticeable when there wasn’t a laugh track.
It’s true. Laugh tracks were used since the 50s to sweeten the audience sound, but sets didn’t close and become exclusively hired laughers and laugh tracks until that incident.
QI (the British panel show) discussed this in an episode during social distancing where they had to perform with no audience: https://youtu.be/EKVD3n6Atl0 (it’s the first topic of conversation, not the whole episode of course)
My favourite bit is:
Alan: “I had a radio show in the late 90’s, and we were so funny that the people at the BBC comedy said we could use those laughs on nearly every other program we make. […] That was the best compliment I’ve ever had in my whole career. ‘We’ve kept your laughs, and we’re using them on other shows’.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweetening_(show_business) gives a quick rundown.
In television, sweetening refers to the use of a laugh track in addition to a live studio audience. The laugh track is used to “enhance” the laughter for television audiences, sometimes in cases where a joke or scene intended to be funny does not draw the expected response, and sometimes to avoid awkward sound edits when a scene is shortened or more than one take is used in editing.
An interesting case (from a book which I unfortunately can’t remember the name of) from when Jack Benny’s career transitioned from radio to tv: he hated the laugh track, so much so that he demanded it be cut way back and lowered in volume. He also utilized it in an unexpected way: when he had a live audience in certain cases, if a joke or gag got an unexpected big laugh that he didn’t think deserved the reaction, he’d fill in a laugh track with a more muted response.
It’s because they think you’re too dumb to get the joke and wanna let you know that something funny happened.
Podcast Stuff You Should Know did an episode on it. I don’t remember the content, but it should have a everything you need
