When will you go back the last time you spared a thought on Sitcom Laugh Tracks? Probably years. Maybe decades? The sitcoms with lower laughter seem almost dead, definitively and firmly dying, for a very long time. And yet, like the villager of the plague Monty Python and the Holy GrailThe format continues to sit down as if to say happily, with a cockney accent: “I’m not yet dead!”
We could watch Laugh Track sitcoms as an anthropologist observing: Here is the half-hour program with preserved laughter in its natural distribution habit, led to a quasi-extinction since the 1990s by an invasive species, comedy to a camera. In 2021, several points of sale declared the format officially deceased when no new new multi-custom sitcom made its debut during the fall season and two acclaimed postmodernist programs (Disney + Wandavision And AMC Kevin can be done) Surgically dismantled the genre.
And yet (Laying Morpheus glasses): What if I had to tell you, there are currently more multi-custom comedies with substantive laughter broadcast on broadcasts than one cam (seven against five), and that many work well enough? That after all the criticisms denigrating and evolving the taste of the public, there is still a new sitcom of Chuck Lorre this season (Georgie & Mandy’s first marriage) In the Nielsen Top 5 broadcast? That even if most of the new streaming comedies are a unique camera, they are often beaten in notes by old -fashioned reruns of decades of Friends And Big Bang theory?
For a long time in derision like sticky and commercial sitcoms, with substantive laughs over the years, have been condemned as a dystopian form of control of the spirit of the joke. A study has shown that laughter makes viewers more likely to find funny jokes and trigger a mirror response – a bit like how to see someone yawn you want to yawn yourself (apologies if you are building now; it is never a writer’s goal). Laughter tracks have also been called systemic misogyny mechanisms, where someone (probably an anonymous white guy of average age) slaps laughter on brutal repressive buffoonery of the sitcom Patriarch (“To the Moon Alice!” Ralph threatens Alice in The newlywedsFist lifted, and locate the pre -recorded huts).
In recent years, however, television has evolved so radically that there is an argument to be made to appreciate the format again in our current era of advanced realism. FX’s “comedy” The bear Beate Emmy Records and is so real that each character is miserable (just like working in a real restaurant). The most popular genre show right now is the HBO The last of usWho takes a luscious idea – the apocalypse zombie – and creates a world so authentic that a sympathetic character dies angularly almost every week. While HBO’s medical drama, The Pittis so faithful to the life you have learned everything you never wanted to know about the problems of hospital endowment. Even a Disney Star Wars show, Etor, Takes his star war so seriously that a recent episode featured an imperial officer trying to rape a rebel (calling it at the moment: the final presents an ewok with cancer). All the great programs, but television – this always reliable escape – now seems to revel in repelling reality on us (how many times in recent years have you read an interview where a showrunner throws the word “founded”?).
The sitcoms of the laughter, for their part, with their intentionally unrealistic and constantly activity characters, sporting perfect hair in shares without shadow with disembodied Greek choirs of floating laughs … No doubt the format feels more artistic than ever because it is so stylized compared to exhausting authenticity anywhere else. These programs are intrinsically weirdAnd weird goes hand in hand with art.
YouTubers made videos that have eliminated the laughter of shows like Friends And Big Bang theory To a painfully clumsy effect (“without the laughter, it looks like a group of people who really hate each other,” observed a commentator). But a comedy with public laughter is his own unified thing that meets in a package that can please. The hearing laughter is hot, its tone is a sunny light; A soft yellow noise. You don’t watch Jerry and Elaine by yourself, it’s like looking at them with a group of people. The awkward silence empty to see Jim and Pam on The officeDifferent, cooler and cold strike. The laughter makes us feel less alone.
There is a frightening part of this. The Original Laff box used to add canned laughter to television shows (yes, its name included a double FF “Laff” and it was indeed a complex box) contained 320 different laughs that were stuck in the 1950s. This Sitcom Ark of the Calle of the Alliance – stuffed with laughter and laughter and titles – was used for decades. Even modern sitcoms often used laughter recorded for years or decades before. You see where it is going (or perhaps not, it is a morbid thought): even after the retreat of the box in the 1970s, the practice of the recording of laughter for eternal reuse continued. Instead of being “filmed in front of a live audience”, the programs have often been created with a partially dead audience. The Laff box, and its more modern versions, had trapped their expressions of hilarity and stuffed them in a small cube for endless recycling.
Speaking of: there is a distinction of industry between the use of live public laughter and entirely canned laughter (and also an common ground, “sweetening”, which uses both – which is the most common tactic these days, because even multi -cam emissions have scenes turned outside). Filming before a public is often considered to be superior because it helps actors improve their joke timing and producers modify dialogue and give notes in real time depending on the response of the public for subsequent taking. There is also contagious Saturday Night Live-The moments like a visible actor find it difficult to stay in character when a joke really works. In other words, a studio audience that provides a piece of laughter makes the spectacle funnier during its shooting. For our needs, however, we have grouped them for a simple reason: the sound is the same. If you can’t make a difference, then is there a difference? Aside from a percentage of the public probably dead, that is to say (sorry-too real?).
This story appeared for the first time in the May 7 issue of the Hollywood Reporter Magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.