- The Drew Gooden channel, is filmed in front of
a live studio audience. (audience applauses) Hi guys. (audience laughing) Its not that funny. So you may know I'm not the
biggest fan of laugh tracks. A couple of years ago
I made a video called, Efficiency in Comedy, where I not only complained about how unnatural the sound of
canned laughter feels while watching a show, but I also tested a theory
I had had for a long time which is that live tracks
don't just grate my ears, and make me roll my eyes, but they also lessen the amount of jokes you can fit in a show by creating dead space in between lines. So when I took an episode
of Friends, for example, and edit out all the segments
where no one was talking, because it was the audiences
turned to make noise, it worked out to be
over five minutes long. And when the entire episode
is only like 21 minutes, that means you're looking
at about a quarter of it having no substance at all. And I know that comedy is not a race, it's not about having the most jokes, it's about having good jokes. If the goal was just to fit
as many jokes as you could into like 10 seconds, you would just say them
all at the same time. (indistinct chatter) Something tells me that
wouldn't work very well. So that idea kept eating away at me until I finally took on the experiment. Two episodes of Friends, two episodes of The Office, one pen and paper, three cups of coffee,
one mental breakdown, and a whole lot of pressing pause. Once I was done, I counted up all the jokes and
was able to determine that, yes in fact the show without laugh tracks had more jokes per minute, which means my hypothesis was correct. And comedy is now
objective, thanks to math. Alright, goodnight everyone. (end credit music) Except not really, because
I wasn't very thorough. I chose two random episodes
of two different shows to try and prove my point. And I don't think that was enough. Every time I think back on that video, I think about an idea that
I was really excited to test but I kind of half-assed
my way into the conclusion that I wanted to have from the beginning. So, I decided to do this again but bigger. Six different shows,
three episodes per show, 12 cups of coffee, and about seven hours of my
life I'll never get back. Here's how it went. (upbeat instrumental music) I didn't just wanna choose
more shows this time. I also wanted to try and pick
different types of shows. It's the same two categories as before, but I feel like there's
some differentiation within each one. So let's start with Parks and Rec'. It wouldn't be fair to
say that Parks and Rec' is underrated, but I do still feel like
it's underappreciated because it will forever be stuck
in the shadow of its older, more popular cousin. Like The Office, Parks and
Rec' was an NBC mockumentary that has continued to thrive due to its second life on Netflix. Something I actually contribute partly to reaction GIFs on the internet. The characters in this show are so strong that you can look at a
silent moving image of Ron Swanson without ever
having watched an episode and know exactly who he is. And now you gotta know
more about this guy, so you might as well
watch all 126 episodes, add in a bunch of home run casting choices and a perfectly satirized fictional town, and you end up with one
of the funnier shows I've ever watched. Because of the fast pace of Parks and Rec' I expected to have the
most jokes per episode of any of the ones on
the list, but we'll see. I use two different
random number generators to pick the episodes I'll be watching, which is what I'll be doing for the rest of the shows as well. Up next Malcolm in the Middle. When I was like nine, my parents came home one day with season one of the show on DVD. I didn't wanna watch it
because for some reason my dumb kid brain got this confused with Miracle in Lane 2, a Disney Channel Movie
where Frankie Muniz, rolls down a hill. Luckily that's not what the DVD was, and we did watch it, and I fell in love. For the next few years, I would rewatch these
episodes over and over again, wishing I could somehow
watch the rest of the show because I guess I was
too stupid to realize they were still airing it on TV. I always thought my parents were lying when they said they couldn't
buy season two on DVD. But years later I found
out it was never released. Turns out it would have
cost Fox too much money to pay for the music
licenses from the show. And so after the first season,
they never even bothered. Anyway, I watched season
one when I was nine and reruns of season two
through seven in high school. This show is so good. Even in spite of the fact that
one third of every episode feels like a week distraction, that's sometimes hard to get invested in. Don't get me wrong, I love Francis as a character, and I loved when he would come home and have interactions with
the rest of the family. But in some episodes, it's
tempting to just fast forward through whatever he's got going on. I think the reason this
show stands out so much is because it wasn't
about a perfect family where things always work out, it's about these realistic
flawed characters who butt heads, and end up in believably bad situations. A lot of the time the humor comes from how things don't work out, even when it seemed like they would. That being said, I feel like Malcolm in the
Middle, was more of a slow burn rather than an onslaught of punchline. So I'm curious to see how
many jokes there are on here compared to the rest of the shows. The final single-camera
show I'm including is, Schitt's Creek. The reason I'm choosing
this one is because I've never watched it. I feel like if I only chose shows I loved then I might come off as biased. And the whole point of this
is to try and do the opposite. The only thing I know about
Schitt's Creek is that one time they paid me $500
to make a vine about it. But then everyone who did
want one had to post it on the same day and it
was a total disaster. But hopefully this show is good. It seems like a great cast. So I have pretty high expectations. Alright, moving onto multi-cams. So let's start with the
one that I think stands out most on this list, The IT Crowd. - Hello. - Well, I guess it doesn't
actually stand out that much. It's just the only British show on here. And that makes it different. It's also probably the
most conceptually simple out of all the shows in here. It's just three people who
work in an IT department. And sometimes they do things. The season two premiere is
probably my favorite episode of any show ever. The way the writers
weaved each story together so that every character's
plot line builds individually, but then they all collide at the end in the most beautiful way. It is art. It's one of the rare times in my life that I didn't actually
mind the studio audience laughing along and applauding at the end, because it felt so earned. I think the most memorable
episodes of TV have this long, slow crescendo from start to finish. And The IT Crowd usually perfected that. Up next, How I Met Your Mother, How I Met Your Mother
premiere around the time when single-camera shows were
starting to have more success. And I think the general
population was just about ready to move on from the old format. Because of that, the show feels like it has
a foot in the door of both. It is technically a multi-camera sitcom, but the laugh track is really
quiet and not too intrusive. It's like the studio
audience is just whispering in the corner. Like, don't worry guys, we're still here, but we're gonna keep it down. I haven't watched the
show since it first aired, but I enjoyed it at the time. They were definitely going for
like a modern Friends vibe. And I think they do a pretty good job. Like every successful show, the reason How I Met Your
Mother worked so well, is because the writing is good, and the characters are very well cast. I don't know if I'll enjoy
it as much as I used to, but I guess I'll find out. Finally, The Big Bang Theory. That's right baby, I brought out the big guns. What you thought I would make
a video about laugh tracks and not talk about the
Smash Mouth of sitcoms. You were dead wrong. Often regarded as the pinnacle
of both entertainment, as well as humankind. The Big Bang Theory is a
show about nerd and hot girl and how those things makes them different. I'm actually kind of excited
to watch a few episodes of this show because it
has so much law around it at this point that I'm thinking there's no way it lives
up to its reputation. Surely I'll laugh a few times, right? Regardless of how I feel about the jokes, so I'm anticipating quite a bit of them. They might actually pull off an upset considering how often the studio audience starts going ape shit. This is probably a good
time to talk about, The Scoring System real quick. That was another thing I don't
think I clarified well enough when I did this originally. I just started counting
jokes all Willy-nilly without ever defining
what I viewed as a joke. So for multi-cams, it's
pretty straightforward. If the audience laughs,
a joke has been made. Every once in a while something
flies under the radar, but my thought process is, if a choice was made by
the writers that was meant to elicit a laugh it counts as a joke. Sometimes lines have more
than one joke in them because of the way they're worded. Sometimes a facial
reaction or a body movement counts as a joke. It really just depends on the situation. If it's a show without a laugh track, I just try to imagine where
the last would be inserted if there was. - I am voting for you. (audience laughs) - You're not voting for yourself? (audience laughs) - Leslie you can't vote for
yourself, I don't think, I'm pretty sure that's illegal. (audience laughs) - That's so funny. Keep in mind if you don't
like my scoring system, you're more than welcome
to try this out yourself. All you have to do is, whip out a notebook and take all the fun out of watching TV. Best part of the video coming up. I'm about to say a bunch of numbers. So in Parks and Rec' first episode, I counted 133 jokes in 21 minutes, then 169 jokes in 27 minutes and then 113 in 23 minutes. I had to reroll for the last episode, 'cause I didn't realize at first that the one I landed on initially was twice as long as the usual episode, and I don't got time for that. Anyway, from those three episodes, that's an average of 5.8 jokes per minute. Malcolm in the Middle,
actually had the best out of any show. It's just a testament to
how well-written it is that they're able to jam
so many jokes in there without you even realizing it sometimes. So I counted 131 jokes,
then 122, then 133, all the episodes are 21 minutes, that's 6.1 jokes per minute on average. And in Schitt's Creek, kinda led me down both numerically and also
it just wasn't as funny as I thought it would be. It's very similar to Arrested
Development plotwise. It's a rich family who lost their fortune and now has to adjust to normal life. But were Arrested Development
has this wide cast of varying characters, I feel like everybody in Schitt's Creek is just kind of the same person. Still pretty funny though. I laughed a few times. I liked the little visual
gags here and there, like them struggling
with these giant menus in the pilot episode. But this one was the
lowest out of the three. I counted 111, 104, and then 112, all the episodes are 21 minutes. That's 5.2 jokes per minute. If you then average those
three numbers together, that's about 5.7 jokes per minute in the three single-camera
shows that I watched. So now the shows with a laugh track, starting with It Crowd, I counted 110 jokes in 23 minutes, 137 jokes in 24 minutes and
then 106 jokes in 22 minutes. How I Met Your Mother ended
up being the slowest pace show out of all of them. I counted 93, then 100, then 103. All the episodes are 21 minutes long. So that's about 4.7 jokes for minute. And then finally The Big Bang
Theory, as I predicted before did have a lot of jokes per episode. I counted 92 in 18
minutes, 114 in 20 minutes, and then 104 in 19 minutes. So average of 5.4 jokes per minute. Better than Schitt's Creek,
at least in terms of volume, but still not enough to bring
the average of multi-cams up works out to be about
five jokes per minute. So I guess all that time I
spend watching these episodes and smelling this sharpie because I couldn't find a regular pen, was not put to waste. Because now it's slightly
stronger statistical evidence of what I tried to prove
like two years ago. I think my biggest takeaway though, is that The Big Bang Theory
does have a lot of jokes. So I guess it's well written. Alright, I gotta rant about
this shit. Watch this scene. (audience laughing) - Water Demon. (audience laughing) - Ice Dragon. (audience laughing) - lesser Warlord of Ka'a (audience laughing) - That's four Laugh tracks and
not a single joke was made. I feel like so much of
the show is just nerdy guy is saying a science thing, and it's funny because
of how nerdy it sounds. And look, I laughed a few
times during the show. It's not that all of
the writing is terrible. Here's a joke I thought was really funny. - Beb, open up. - I'm not talking to you. - And who are you talking to? (audience laughs) - It's just the constant
laughing at nothing that drives me crazy. And I think that's a big reason
why people are so turned off by laugh tracks. They're so overused in shows like this, that it's hard to trust what
you're actually watching. It's like, boy who cried laugh, you keep telling me
something funny happened but I don't see it. And then by the time something
funny actually does happen, I don't believe it. The Big Bang Theory ran for 12 seasons. And it was on the air for so
long that by the time it ended, TV culture had completely changed. There seem to be way fewer
sitcoms made like this anymore. Hell even their spinoff
show Young Sheldon, is shot in a completely different format. It's more narrative focused. There's no studio audience. It's actually insane to me
that it spawned from this. - Hey. I brought Chinese. - And I brought Indian. (audience laughing) - Even without my weird
dumb math exercise, I think the general population
has been subconsciously catching onto this for a while, and is just not as interested in this kind of sitcoms anymore. In fact when I think back to
some of the funniest shows that I've watched recently, a lot of them aren't even
like straightforward comedies. Certain HBO shows like
Barry and Silicon Valley. They're super funny and they're
filled with comedic actors, but they also have this
really compelling story going under the background
of all the GIFs. Actually the hardest I think
I've laughed at a show recently is in Succession. which is this insanely well-written
series with plot twists and these brutal backstabbing moments. And then there's this
randomly hilarious scene with Greg and Tom that I can't play or this video would get age restricted. I think maybe where we as an
audience have slowly shifted over the past couple of decades. I can't speak for everyone obviously because everybody has their
own individual tastes. But for me, there's something much more satisfying about the juxtaposition of emotional depth followed by jokes that break that tension. Good punchlines are important, but in order for you to actually
care about what's going on, you need to get invested in
the characters and their lives. Even in shows like Parks and Rec' that have these
relentlessly silly moments, they'll sometimes follow those up with a much more serious scene to flesh out the characters
on an emotional level. Like watching this one episode, I'm sitting here counting
joke after joke, after joke, and then all of a sudden, there's a shift with
the last minute or so, there's hardly any joke. Leslie wins the city council
race that she's been on for the entire season up until that point. And so she gives this nice speech, about how she couldn't have
done it without the hard work of all her friends. They even have a great
little detail in there where they show the part where
she starts going off script and just speaking from the heart. And it ends up being this
really nice heartwarming moment that grounds and otherwise absurd show. And I think that's ultimately
what keeps me coming back. You wanna be invested in
what's going on in the universe because when you are, all of the jokes are gonna hit harder. To bring up Parks and Rec' one last time. There's another really
good scene in that episode, where is having this conflicting moment because she's fulfilling a lifelong dream, but she also just found out
her boyfriend might take a job that puts him several hundred miles away. You can feel the emotion on her face. You can empathize with her. And then Paul Rudd comes
in to break the tension. - Leslie, I can't figure this thing out. Can you help me this? - Yeah, just hang on a second Bobby. - I've ink all over my hands and the pen thingy came off the chain. - And to me at least
the most memorable shows strike that perfect balance between funny but also compelling. There's always still gonna be a place for more straightforward comedy shows with constant shallow punchlines. It really just depends
on what mood you're in. Sometimes you just wanna
laugh at something dumb. Sometimes you don't wanna watch a show with emotional depth 'cause it's like, I got
my own shit going on, and now I gotta care about
these fictional characters too. It's interesting to me
the way that television has slowly shifted away
from the traditional sitcom. When you look at what's on TV right now, CBS is really the only
major network with shows that still have laugh tracks in them. The other thing I noticed
a lot of these shows have in common, its
they almost all feature an old random actor who's been
around for a very long time. Matt LeBlanc, Patricia Heaton,
Cedric the Entertainer. CBS's approach is so clearly like we're gonna make shows with
actors that you recognize from other shows using the
same format of those shows. We realized their target demographic is people who hate change, and there's no point of trying to tailor to this new generation of people, who's gonna be more interested
in Netflix and Tik TOK, no matter what we do. Laugh tracks are hanging on by a thread. And I don't think it'll be much longer before we look back on this era like, hey, isn't that kinda weird
that we used to do that. But like a lot of things in life, it made sense for a long time
and then eventually it didn't. People change, pop culture
evolves, it's inevitable. I don't know about you guys, but the show Friends has
taken on a brand new role in my life, in that the only time I watch it, is when I'm trying to fall asleep. There's something about the
static predictable rhythm of sitcom audio at a very low volume that puts my mind at ease. So I guess that's all I really
have to say about this topic. Though the other thing that
drives me crazy about TV is the constant breaks every time you get invested
in what's happening, they cut to someone else
who tries to sell your shit. And I hate it... The Drew Gooden channel will return after a word from our sponsor. Hi I'm depressed, but you may know me as founder and CEO of picture of hotdog.com. A website that was recently
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commercials are only on TV and not on the internet. Well guy, thank you so much
for watching today's video. It means a lot that
you're willing to look at and, or listen to me for about
10 to 20 minutes at a time. Be sure to tune in next week for a video where I do
the same exact exercise as I did in this one, only instead of sitcoms, I go
back and count all the jokes in my own YouTube videos. Not to spoil anything but I
hear the number ends up being so much lower than I was hoping, that it makes me cry and I quit making YouTube videos forever. Alright. See you then. (upbeat music)
