I’m rewatching some older sitcoms and the laugh track is so odd to me. I remember thinking nothing of it growing up, but now that I’ve been watching sitcoms without it, it feels completely pointless. Who thought it was a good idea and why?
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One of my favorite videos of Friends is just Ross being Ross, but without the laugh track. It is disturbing.
I have been to a couple live tapings. One of Everyone Loves Raymond. They told us they tried really hard to get things on the first take because the initial laugh of the audience is usually the best. I also went to a comedians talk show (since canceled) a few years back. One skit was painfully painfully unfunny. It was about 3-4 mins long and they made the audience rewatch the skit at the end to laugh harder. It was so painful. It was hard to fake laugh at that retched skit.
My thought is issues like these just made laugh tracks easier to use.
Original sitcoms were more like plays and filmed in front of an actual audience. Laugh tracks were inserted later to help make the show seem funnier.
You maybe have seen the famous example of [Big Bang Theory without a laugh track](https://youtu.be/8ib889nSZVU)
Nowadays, comedy has evolved as well as storytelling. Shows don’t need to rely on laugh tracks anymore.
However, there is a revival of live studio audiences for some sitcoms. A lot of the audience is made up of writers who worked on the show and who didn’t but, they also allow fans to go to viewings.
Consider how stories were told for nearly the entirety of human existence. You sat around a campfire or whatever, and someone told a story, and the audience responded. If it was funny, they laughed. Eventually, as societies settled down and got bigger people started putting on more organized plays, and you’d go sit and watch the actors. You and the people around you would respond. If they did something funny, everyone would laugh. After the invention of movies, they’d film the actors and play the movie to a room packed full of people and again, the audience would react to the action on screen.
Now consider television. It’s being beamed out to millions of people sitting in their living rooms, often by themselves. Unlike basically the entirety of human experience, listening to a story being told is no longer a social activity, it’s being done in isolation. It’s no wonder that studies filmed shows in front of a live audience, and later on just added artificial audience responses.
They aren’t trying to tell people when to laugh, they are trying to fill the gap left by the missing audience around you.
>in the past
No, I’m afraid they are still widely used. Even shows that are filmed in front of a live audience are heavily edited to make it more toward a laugh track then actual audience response. So yeah, most shows I have watched all had laugh tracks.
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