Why the World Still Needs Laugh Tracks
By: Ernie Smith
Tags: Comedy, Television, History, Pop Culture, Covid 19

John Oliver’s first episode without the benefit of a laugh track.

Why does canned laughter stand out so much when it’s missing?

When John Oliver stopped taping Last Week Tonight in front of a studio audience, it had me feeling just as discombobulated as the then-new beast that is COVID-19 did.

Oliver is a man who has a lot of experience telling good jokes, and he has done so for many years, but I can’t think of another time in his entire career where he’s made such jokes without the benefit of a laugh track. Oliver winged it in a new environment without any benefit of a crowd to soften the blow from the difficult truths he was throwing at the audience in regards to a scary crisis that forced his show off the air faster than a New York City snowstorm.

But while a missing laugh track was a new experience for someone like Oliver, it was not one for television in general. In recent years, shows as diverse as Arrested Development, The Office, and Modern Family have not only survived without them — they’ve thrived. But the starkness of a show built around a laugh track not having one felt like a commentary on the crowd itself, the way that people make the world feel just a bit more whole.

To put this all another way, it highlights the way that laugh tracks have remained highly contested elements of what makes good television. Some shows thrive on the laughter; others feel sharper without it.

The rise of studio audience-based laughter was driven by two aspects: One, audience expectations, and two, a need to help beef up the reaction to what was happening on the screen. Because people had previously experienced comedy inside theaters or movie houses rather than in the comfort of their own homes,

From its beginnings in radio, when audience applause and laughter was added to the performances, the laugh track was seen as extremely controversial. Erskine Johnson, a well-known Hollywood gossip columnist, wrote of the problem of “canned laughter” as early as 1952, taking the stance that it was an unwelcome nuisance.

“My theory is that if it’s funny I’ll laugh — and I don’t need howls of an unseen audience bursting into my living room to convince me that Lucille or Gracie or Eve are hilarious people,” Johnson wrote. “Hollywood has been filming comedies for years without ‘canned laughter.’ Laughs never made an unfunny comedy funny.”

Hollywood apparently disagreed, even if some of the people on the ground sided with Erskine Johnson. Marc Daniels, a TV director known for his work with I Love Lucy and I Married Joan, told newspaper columnist Hal Humphrey in 1953 that laugh tracks ruined the integrity of the shows by forcing a perception of humor.

“We’re dictating to the viewers when we add studio laughs in any form,” Daniels told Humphrey. “We’re saying, ‘This is funny, so laugh!’ We don’t trust the viewers, nor do we have faith in what we are doing. The laughs are added to convince both ourselves and viewers that the show is funny.”

Daniels himself said that he challenged the use of such laugh tracks when they began to be used on I Love Lucy, but lost the battle. “Now, of course, they will never find out if the show needed the laughs, because the pattern has been set,” he added.

And to this day, people call for the death of the laugh track. Writer Jordan Fraser, in a piece for Medium’s Overlords site, makes a compelling case that laugh tracks get in the way of good comedy.

“What I loved about Seinfeld was the amazing jokes that came one after another,” Fraser wrote. “What I hated was how slowly the jokes had to be delivered while the actors constantly waited for the studio audience to shut the hell up.”

For some modern shows, though, the pattern really works. Back in 2012, a series of videos went viral that did nothing but feature The Big Bang Theory, a show with a large number of haters alongside its many fans, without a laugh track. Some watch this and assume that it’s a clear sign that the show isn’t funny and has no jokes.

I have a more charitable view, as I actually appreciate the show: It’s a type of sitcom that works with a laugh track not to cover up bad jokes, but to keep things moving snappily. If they had designed the show without a laugh track, its dialogue would be built to match.

More sitcoms used to be built like that show, where the laugh track is actually a key part of maintaining the rhythm of the episode. Don’t blame Chuck Lorre for simply building a traditional sitcom using a key part of the form.

Another subject of similar criticism is Friends, which often feels flat and lifeless without all those cackling voices pushing it forward. It also changes the tenor of the characters — Ross Geller takes on a particularly dark tone with the loss of comedic context.

So, who’s right?