For example, in The Big Bang Theory, you might hear laughter after the camera shows x person has been standing in the room the entire time wearing something unexpected—a live audience would have been able to see x person the entire time and wouldn’t have laughed after the camera cut. Or, the camera might cut to a whole different room before you hear sudden laughter. However, you can also tell by the length the actors pause between lines that there is some audience “involvement” with the laughter determining how long they wait. How do the camera cuts mesh with the live audience?
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Shows like that typically supplement the live studio reactions with canned laughter. So if there’s a visual gag that’s hard to hide from the live audience, they can use canned laughter (or cut in the audience’s reaction when they *did* first see the gag, even if it was earlier in the taping). Multi-cam sitcoms are also more strategic with hiding that sort of thing, which is why visual gags are often revealed by someone walking through one of the many doors in the set rather than cutting to show someone who was in the room the whole time.
Sitcoms have had laugh tracks for so long that they’ve been written into the process.
The pause you see isn’t because of spontaneous audience involvement; the jokes are written to have obvious punchlines, and the actors know to pause afterward for the laughter to be inserted. The audience- if they’re really there- is prompted when to laugh, and most of the laugh tracks you hear are canned audio anyway.
Have you ever tried watching one of those shows with the laugh tracks removed? Give it a shot. It makes it really, really obvious how much prompting they need to actually get the laughs where they’re supposed to be.
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