Why Sitcoms Stopped Using Laugh Tracks - Cheddar Explains

this is a clip from the hit TV series Parks and Recreation 128 ounce option most people call it a gallon but they call it the regular now let's see what that same clip would be like if we added a laugh track 128 ounce option most people call it a gallon but they call it the regular it seems so wrong but for most of television history it was so right over the last half century or so almost every comedy on television had canned laughter from I Love Lucy to the Big Bang Theory for some the laughter is viewed as an imposition for others a secondary character you almost forgot was there until it wasn't anymore in recent years the laugh track has been used less and less as sitcoms in general have decreased in popularity let's break down where the mysterious laugh box came from and where it went before television existed there was the ballet the Opera magic and comedy shows when you went to one of these events you were experiencing the audience reactions in real time if something was shocking you could hear and feel the gasps echo around you and similarly with laughter but then came the radio the first ever broadcast medium those communal reactions disappeared as American families gathered in their living rooms to be entertained radio producers wanted to develop a way to give people the live experience at home the first-ever laugh track began with Bing Crosby's radio show recording pioneer Jack Mullen recalls the creation two channels of communication a trade journal in 1981 the hillbilly comic Bob Burns was on the show one time and through a few of his then extremely racy and off-color folksy farm stories into the show we recorded it live and they all got enormous but we couldn't use the jokes so scriptwriter bill Moreau asked us to save the last a couple of weeks later he had a show that wasn't very funny and he insisted that we put in the salvage less thus the laugh track was bored fast forward to the era of early television comedies were filmed with a single camera in front of a live audience that meant that each scene would be filmed multiple times from multiple angles instead of the multi cams today which have multiple cameras capturing one take those separate angles and takes would be cut together and when that happened the laughter was inconsistent audiences would laugh at the wrong time too loudly for too long and were simply unreliable in the late 1940s CBS sound engineer Charlie Douglas noticed those inconsistencies and couldn't take it anymore if a joke didn't get a desired laugh he would insert one with the use of a laugh track this technique became known as sweetening Douglass went so far as to create a physical laugh box according to Ron Simon curator of television and radio at the Paley Center for Media the device was about three feet tall the shape of a filing cabinet very heavy and had slots for 32 reels which could hold ten laughs each it was officially named the audience response duplicator but it became known as The Laugh box at its best The Laugh box could hold three hundred and twenty laps press them one at a time and you get a similar laughs press multiple keys at once and a symphony of laughter would play each key represented a different age sex and style of laughs with a foot pedal regulating the way The Laugh box was mysterious though since Douglas owned the patent and created all of them nobody outside of him and his family members had ever seen the inside of the Machine and when Douglas wasn't around the machine was kept tightly pad locked in an interview with TV Guide in 1966 dick Hobson said if the laugh box should start acting strangely The Laugh boys wheel it into the men's room locking the door behind them so no one can Pete I mentioned the name Charlie Douglas and it's like Cosa Nostra everybody starts whispering it's the most taboo topic in TV the first sitcom to use the laugh box was the short-lived series the Hank McCune show in 1950 the idea of recorded laughter spread throughout Hollywood and by the 1960s almost every single cameras sitcom was utilizing canned laughter but it was only Douglas that engineered the laughing for everyone for almost a decade for $100 Douglas would wheel the mysterious box to each studio on a dolly and sit with the producers in a screening room and decide what kind of laughter and when eventually Douglas hired a second-in-command to keep up with the 100 hours of television he needed to sweeten and the rest was history multicam sitcoms were popularized in shows like friends Frasier Seinfeld and more incorporated canned laughter the actors and actresses would know to hold for laughter knowing that each scene would be sweetened the Discovery Channel documentary the one that goes behind the scenes shows how it works sometimes the audience responds to big if I went with the actual lab that laugh is still going through her next line into his next reaction and that's it's five six seconds and in TV gland that's an eternity sometimes we have to put in a glass sir that is shorter it felt like comedies would be like this forever and then the Big Bang Theory went off the air in 2019 and took with it one of the last multicam sitcoms with canned laughter when we look at the television landscape today almost every single comedy is a single-camera comedy and not a multicam sitcom with canned laughter you can count on two hands how many multicam sitcoms that use a laugh track are on TV right now and not to mention those that went off the air this year the use of the laugh track has almost disappeared completely from the TV lineup so what changed dead air in television used to be frowned upon and shows would push for laugh tracks whenever possible bill cosby claimed his first sitcom the bill cosby show that ran from 1961 to 1971 failed because he had insisted on not using a laugh track not to be confused with the very successful The Cosby Show that aired in the 1980s and did have a laugh track and mash fought to not have a laugh track at all but they came to a compromise with the studio they would use the canned laughter but just not during the very serious oh our scenes while we associate the 80s and the 90s with the laugh track that was actually the time when single camera comedies without canned laughter started to take over a key player in this transition was HBO their show's dream on in 1990 and the Larry Sanders Show in 1992 ran without laughs tracks and even garnered praise for doing so the airing of these shows proved that comedies could exist and exist successfully without laugh tracks other studios took notice and began to follow suit then came Curb Your Enthusiasm malcolm in the middle' scrubs Arrested Development It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia 30 rock the office and the list goes on and on writers and producers were excited by the change as it allowed them to stray from the constant stream of punchlines to explore character based humor another reason the laugh track fell to the wayside according to Mike Royce the co showrunner of Netflix is one day at a time I think one of the reasons why people don't like laugh tracks is they don't like to be told how to react it's an American thing don't tell me what the to laugh at the Big Bang Theory was one of the last big sitcoms that used canned laughter and even their creator Chuck Lorre insisted that absolutely no sweetening took place on any of his series which also include Two and a Half Men and Mike and Molly stating I do not and have never sweetened my shows with fake laughs I've always thought it was pretty hateful and a self-defeating practice for now the laugh track lives in a very strange state it's used in very few shows but lives on in the reruns of ever popular series like Friends How I Met Your Mother and more perhaps history might repeat itself and we'll see a resurgence in multicam sitcoms and the laugh track until then we can thank streaming services like Netflix and Hulu for keeping Charlie Douglass's legacy in our living rooms thank you for watching please be sure to LIKE comment and subscribe to our channel and ring the bell below that way you're notified whenever we post a new video

Channel: Cheddar

Views: 3,114,531

Rating: 4.8530221 out of 5

Keywords: Cheddar, laugh track, laugh tracks, laugh, sitcom, sitcoms, sitcom no laugh track, sitcom with no laugh track, comedy, without a laugh track, the laugh track, the office laugh track, friends no laugh track, friends without laugh track, with a laugh track, friends without a laugh track, no laugh track, big bang theory no laugh track, laff box, HBO, friends, big bang theory, seinfeld, cheddar explains, explainer

Id: VPShStd8p3Q

Length: 8min 57sec (537 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/tinmanjj]

I always find these discussions to be fascinating. I’m a gen x’er, so I grew up with shows with laugh tracks. My brain must have learned to filter them out, because I don’t even notice them until someone points them out. If I focus on them, they are annoying, but otherwise, I don’t hear them. For anyone who didn’t grow up with them, it must be maddening.

[u/hoanns]

The actual answer to the question starts at 6:12. All before is history of laugh track

[u/[deleted]]

"Hey Sheldon, what would you be if you were attached to another object by an inclined plane, wrapped helically around an axis?"

>audience nervously chuckles; a few scattered but stifled guffaws are heard. The anticipatory tension in the air is so thick that one could cut it with a knife.

"Screwed."

>audience barely remains silent as everybody struggles to hold in their laughter, sides silently splitting, their eyes bulging as their faces scrunch together in an effort to contain themselves. Several people, mostly women and children, simply pass out, falling forward in their seats. Some people move to help them, but they too pass out, incapable of both holding their laughter and helping their fellow man.

"There you go."

>audience explodes in a raucous cacophony of overpowering noise. Ears begin to bleed as the combined volume of their laughter and mirth breaks the sound barrier. Eventually sonic waves begin pouring forth from the audience as its members begin to cackle on in unison; those who passed out before have now risen and added their voices to the din. On stage, the actors catch the full brunt of the audience's veritable sound explosion. Those lucky enough to be center stage die quickly as their brains are scrambled; those unfortunate enough to be on the sides suffer slowly as their brains slowly melt, bleeding from every orifice. Eventually the audiences grows too loud and brings the studio crashing down upon their heads, silencing them forever.

[u/nauticalsandwich]

The thing I feel like I see a lot of the younger generation missing about laugh tracks is the "social/theatrical element." Laugh tracks were not designed to make you think the jokes are funnier than they actually are. These shows aren't trying to tell you when to laugh. Seinfeld wasn't funnier than Curb Your Enthusiasm because it had a laugh track, and Larry David isn't better at writing jokes for CYE than he was for Seinfeld. If making jokes funnier is even a measurable effect of laugh tracks, it is a welcome, side-benefit. The real reason for laugh tracks (or live studio laughter) is partially tradition, and partially to infuse a theatrical element and tonal warmth to the show. Before TV, people went to the theater. The social element of the theater is what they were used to. TV producers, in an attempt to make the rather new and expensive small-format experience of TV more appealing and wholesome to families at home, found recorded laughter a welcome familiarity to TV-viewing audiences. TV audiences liked it. If they hadn't, it wouldn't have become the fixture of TV comedies that it ultimately became. On top of this, as many of the traditions of theater overlapped with TV production in its formative years (and there was much crossover between stage and screen), TV producers brought audiences into the studios, which they found to be a valuable element of feedback for the actors, directors, and writers, as well as a great advertising tool.

To put it briefly, the success of the "laugh track," and the relatively low-cost production of the "3-camera" sitcom in comparison to "single-camera" dramas, quickly solidified and traditionalized its use. Audiences grew accustomed to it, and the laugh track became more than just a recording of the live studio audience, or a simulation of theater. It became a kind of social cohesion--a subconscious glimpse or reminder that when you watched broadcast TV, you weren't watching it alone, you were watching simultaneously with thousands or even millions of other folks in your city, time-zone, or country, so many of your fellow countrymen, all huddled on their living room couches, enjoying the same piece of entertainment. It also became a genre signifier. Like the canted camera angles and harsh shadows of a noir, or the bright technicolor and brassy orchestras of a Hollywood musical, a "3-walled" set and a laugh track signaled a certain kind of comedy-- a tone, joke-type, and a rhythm.

The decline of the laugh track, in my opinion, is primarily the consequence of 2 prominent trends in TV: the rise of on-demand (a.k.a. Streaming or non-broadcast) content, and the radical reduction in cost of "single-camera" sitcoms relative to the stage-play-like "3-camera" sitcoms. With these shifts, TV audiences started becoming more and more accustomed to a rapidly expanding assortment of single-camera, laugh-track-less sitcoms while simultaneously losing their connection to the last remnant of "congregation" in TV: broadcast. The experience for TV audiences, in effect, has been the near-total severing of its relationship to the crowded theater. Laugh-tracks, where they remain, exist as a form of tradition or nostalgia.

[u/DaveBustaine]

I can save you 9 minutes by just telling you that it's because of The Simpsons.