A history. When they had audience laughter at things that weren’t actually funny, I always found it annoying.
And I didn’t know that Sharon Tate played Jethro’s first love.
[Update early afternoon]
Related: Church adds laugh track to pastor’s jokes.
4 thoughts on “Laugh Tracks”
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We never really had laugh tracks in the UK when I was young and still watching TV. At least, not in the US sense; there were shows filmed in front of an audience which had the audience reaction, but not the artificial tracks added to tell people when to laugh.
I remember some big fuss in the US about an episode of MASH with no laugh track, but no-one in the UK understood what the fuss was because we never had them on the show.
It just seems a really bizarre idea, to have to tell people what they should consider funny. I saw an interesting Youtube video some months ago which compared Seinfeld with and without laugh tracks; I never really saw much of it and never found it particularly funny, but without the laugh track it went from ‘not very funny’ to ‘holy cow, these people are sick.’
Interesting that the article mentioned Fawlty Towers. I don’t remember whether we had a laugh track on that one, but it would probably have stood out from the other shows at the time if it did.
Actually, the audience track on the shows is another difference between the US and UK. I’ve been in the audience for TV comedy shows in both countries, and in the UK you just laugh when something is funny, while in the US they have a big sign telling you when to laugh or clap. One natural, one as completely contrived as the machine-generated laugh track.
Seems to me, it’s all about pushing The Narrative, just like the rest of the US mass media.
I have always found laugh tracks insulting… Why should I laugh when YOU tell me to?
You can see what sitcoms look like w/o them these days just watch any episode of The Office either UK or US version. The psychological point of them is what I call the “communal” experience. They make you feel like part of an audience. Then the punch line is reinforced by being a subconscious member of a group. It is well known psychology that it’s easier to induce laughter in an individual as part of laughing crowd. The point of it in the case of television is not so much to make you laugh but to make you feel at home with the plot and the characters via group acceptance to make you a repeat customer so the advertisers can reach you. If the comedy is really bad OR the in joke punch line is not part of your subculture. You then get the off putting audio version of the uncanny valley. In that case you probably won’t last till the end of the episode.
I loved the part if the story that described the inventor and his ”black box” that no one else was allowed to toy with and that he hid with it in a bathroom to fix. They wheeled him in to overdub the laugh tracks and then he wheeled himself out to the next studio, rinse, repeat. His product was so specialized yet such a niche market and apparently he was easily accessible and cheap enough it wasn’t worth the time and money to compete. Well not until technology overtook him. So 60s Hollywood.