Talk:Laugh track

message: "The first American television show to incorporate a laugh track was the American  sitcom  The Hank McCune Show in 1950.[1]" I'm not sure why this should be in the introduction, more notable would be the first laugh track in the world, not just America
122.62.32.133 (talk) 11:07, 15 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  First American laugh track? 

message: can someone write about how it works in the production room? how many different tracks are there? how were they selected? from what shows did they come? what are the standard practices? Kingturtle 10:26, 8 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Indeed, I hope someone who knows about it will add the information. I don't think the article should be focused completely on just what sitcoms use a laugh track and those that don't. --Mrtea 04:21, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

text: The laughs are programmed into a small laptop looking device with supposedly over 500 different laughs and chuckles. I recently contacted Tamara Johnson over the e-mail, and she said "... the laughs I utilize come from the "laugh men". They are the ones with the audience material and library." I would suspect that at least one of the laugh men is "Jack Donato" after closely studying episodes of Wizards of Waverly Place and My Wife and Kids end credits. The producer of the show tells the re-recording mixers when in particular to insert a laugh track, and how loud and long or short it should be, and the inensity is rated on a scale of 1 to 5. Laughs vary, most from Amercians, some from people overseas. Laugh tracks are inserted most likely just like most editing software, with video and audio tracks and wave-length files that are put under the original and dubbed audio of the programming. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.187.69.81 (talk) 11:20 and 11:21, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  How does it work? 

message: I don't know how you can mention shows that don't use the laugh track and not mention the Simpsons, probably the most successful comedy of all of the ones mentioned by far.
So why didn't you mention it?
:That's easy. "The Simpsons" is animated. Laugh tracks don't work in animation since there is no live audience watching.Peter Tangney 18:02, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: There isn't in most sitcoms either. — Mütze 10:18, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Counter example: The Flintstones. --86.135.218.31 (talk) 21:11, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

text:  The Simpsons is notable because it borrowed many artistic styles from live action television and films, yet rejected the laugh track. It demonstrated how a live action television show could be funny without a laugh track. Many subsequent live-action television shows then borrowed their comedic format from the Simpsons, including the absence of a laugh track. --70.81.253.182 (talk) 08:54, 24 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Simpsons 

message: Do shows recycle the same old laugh tracks or does each show record its own?
If it is recycled, are we listening to people laughing who are dead now?
: i don't know what they do today, but the laugh tracks used in the 70s were of dead people. Kingturtle 18:50, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hmm. 

message: This section was plagiarized from The Straight Dope. I have posted it here in case someone wants to try rewriting it. If you rewrite from this text, make sure to say, "According to The Straight Dope," or some other similar attribution.
The man who made canned laughter what it is today was Charley Douglass (1910-2003), a sound engineer who devised the 'Laff Box'. This was a unique contraption that stood a little over two feet tall and could be played like an organ to replicate different kinds of laughter, from guffaws to belly laughs. The operator could also select particular genders and ages, so a kids' show could have a simulated audience full of giggling children. No one is really sure where the original recordings came from; some say Douglass recorded audiences from I Love Lucy, The Red Skelton Show, or Marcel Marceau's mime act. All of these were heavy on sight gags, which probably made the recording process a little easier. Douglass won a special Emmy for engineering in 1992.
cluth 18:22, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plagiarism-here for rewrite 

message: I feel the following two sentences need some kind of citation or removal: TV critics have often claimed that laugh tracks are used to cover up problems with the writing of a TV show, by using artificial "canned" laugh tracks to make the show seem funnier than it actually is. This has led some to change the common phrase "taped in front of a live studio audience" into "live in front of a taped studio audience." --Crossmr 23:31, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Citations 

message: should we have a list of shows the use a laugh track?Angelofdeath275 21:08, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: List?

message: It says in the first sentence of the article that the laughter track is is a separate soundtrack with the artificial sound of audience laughter". But most laughter tracks (or at leasts a large proportion) are not artificial; the show is filmed in front of a live audience, so why is this sentence saying that all laughter tracks are fake?
A lot of shows like The Odd Couple and Happy Days, an announcement was broadcast that said "The Odd Couple/Happy Days is filmed before a LIVE audience".
Well, they could hardly film it in front of a DEAD one, can they?
Happy Days later said that it was filmed in front of a studio audience, omitting the word "live".
Arthurvasey (talk) 12:23, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: You cannot be that dense.  A laugh track is a fake laugh track added over a show.  Actually most shows are no longer taped in front of live audiences.  This is something that started to end during the 1980s and was almost dead by the end of the 1990s.  If a show has a live audience it does not have a laugh track.  If you are watching most any sitcom from very recent history, it has a laugh track.  -Thebdj 01:51, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Question

message: I wanted to add after "Philadelphia": "Their prevalence might be explained by the success of animated comedies such as The Simpsons — which was a major influence on the first of these sitcoms, Malcolm in the Middle — as well as by the increasing use of cutaways, which are clearly not filmed linearly."  However, as of now it's unsourced and arguably POV.  If anyone wants to adapt this, though, it'd be nice to add. Calbaer 02:23, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Help me make this NPOV

message: Last of the Summer Wine is hardly an exception, most UK stuff with laughter on it will have been shown to an audience in some form or other. I suspect this is true of most American stuff too and that people don't really understand what the hell they are talking about.
::Oh, so that's why the laughter DOESN'T sound generated, and DOESN'T play over things that aren't really funny. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 66.81.190.144 (talk) 04:20, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Not Having A Live Studio Audience Does Not Mean Canned Laughter

message: This article directs the "All in the Family" article. In the "All in the Family" article, Norman Lear is cited as having claimed that the show never used 'canned laughter.' This article states that the show did indeed use canned laughter and 'sweetening' in later years. I don't know which is correct, but I figure it should be pointed out.
All In The Family never used canned laughter. That is in an error and I already fixed it. Nevilledad 06:41, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Contradictions with Wiki article on "All in the Family" 

message: "Animals do the funniest things", "Planet's Funniest Animals", and others in that genre.  I can't watch them, the fake laughter is just cringeworthy. Davetibbs 11:32, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Surely the worst example of laugh tracks 

message: any citable sources ever pointed out the similarity to the greek chorus? --86.135.218.31 (talk) 21:10, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  greek chorus? 

message: 1. All sitcoms with laughter are made in front of a studio audience. A visit to http://www.tvtickets.com/ and http://www.radioandtelly.co.uk/tvaudience.html. would have cleared that up quite quickly.
2. The term 'laughter track' refers to the actual laughter recorded on the night, sometimes edited to help transition between takes. It is completely different from 'canned laughter'. The only shows I know which used real 'canned laughter' are 'Scooby Doo' and 'Mash'. If anyone doubts this, why don't they apply for tickets at one of the above sites and see for themselves?
3. Speaking as someone who works in television, and has made various TV shows of the type discussed, I think this is an example of Wikipedia at its absolute worst. Conjecture and conspiracy theory dressed up as hard fact. It should be taken down because it contains as much truth as the average article on, say,  Conservapedia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.70.246.157 (talk) 16:32 and 18:11, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: First of all, you'll get a lot further if you come in with constructive criticism and helpful responses, rather than just tearing everything apart.  Secondly, dictionary.com defines "Laugh track" as a separate sound track of prerecorded laughter added to the sound track of a radio or television program to enhance or feign audience responses..  Nobody said this was (necessarily) in place of a studio audience, but are you asserting that there is never canned laughter added to enhance what a studio audience generates?  Thirdly, I didn't realize such shows as the Flintstones and Jetsons were actually filmed in front of a studio audience...  --Rehcsif (talk) 16:42, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Right, so you're using MORE CARTOONS to refute my arguments. And the reason I'm tearing the whole piece apart is because it is wrong from top to bottom, and I don't have time to edit it myself. But it's unbelievably frustrating and annoying to see conjecture like this reported as fact. I'll say it one more time to be clear--'canned laughter' is completely different to a 'laughter track' and anything that says they more or less amount to the same thing is disingenuous and insulting to the people who work hard to elicit real laughter from real people. The reason I'm 'tearing it apart' is because it so casually does the same to an entire style of TV comedy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.70.246.157 (talk) 16:59, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

text: And in answer to your question, I'm not saying that sweetening doesn't happen, of course it does, but in my own experience the laughter you hear on a show is the laughter you get on the night. Of course you edit it like you edit every other element of a show (for instance, when jumping between takes, or when an audience laughs at something that won't be funny to people at home), but that doesn't mean we're all engaged on a massive conspiracy to make people laugh at things that aren't funny. Please, whoever wrote this entry, just come to see a show. That should clear everything up. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.70.246.157 (talk) 17:07 and 17:08, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm pretty sure what you're talking about is only true for British shows. In the US they seem to be much less principled about sticking in fake laughter when the original audience didn't react appropriately. --86.135.218.31 (talk) 04:19, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: How do you know this?!! Where are you getting your facts from? When you say 'seem to be', why aren't you sure? And if you aren't sure, why are you assuming it to be true?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.70.230.213 (talk) 18:06, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: stones, glass houses? give your own sources. --86.144.101.168 (talk) 19:35, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

text: Well actually How I Met Your Mother is shot without and audience, and the producers take note of where a "post audience" laughed at the show and insert a laugh track —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.187.69.81 (talk) 11:09 and 11:10, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

text: iCarly and Drake and Josh were both shot on closed sets and featured occasional laughs from the people on the crew (With the exception of the pilot episode of Drake and Josh) Seasons 6-10 of All That also shot on closed sets and relied on filling in realistic laugh tracks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.187.69.81 (talk) 11:12, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Whole page is wrong and written by somebody who has no idea of how TV shows are made 

message: Excellent article ... featured article vote.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.133.158.225 (talk) 00:56, 29 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Should be a featured article ... tidied up a bit 

message: "Eventually, both performers and producers began to get greedy when they realized the power behind these prerecorded chuckles" seems an odd way of phrasing it for a neutral encyclopaedia. I have changed it to "began to realise the power behind these prerecorded chuckles"84.92.163.247 (talk) 05:53, 19 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed. I believe I put that original sentence in the article, and it was based directly from a TV Guide article in 1966.Oanabay04 (talk) 20:45, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  greedy? 

message: I deleted this show from the list. It never used a laugh track and it was filmed with one camera (16mm). Saemikneu (talk) 01:07, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Malcolm in the middle]] 

message: Okay, Dan Schneider (the creator of iCarly and Drake and Josh), explained this on his blog. A shows process with a laugh track goes like this:
*They shoot scenes that are capable of being shot in front of a live audience in front of one. This is very hard for certain shows(Wizards of Waverly Place as an example) because the show features many special effects, or something that could possibly harm audience members. I have been to two tapings (True Jackson and Suite Life on Deck), and we also shot many scenes over and over and over again, and by the time they got the final take, only a few people laughed. Since I am a big geek, I really know this part. The editors (sound re-recording mixers, laugh mixers, or post production providers) will go and sit with the produccer and director of the episodes and slowly insert or sweeten the episode. For some shows this is very easy because it is funny, for others the show is either not that funny or shoots without a live audience. I can watch a show and tell you specifically what laugh is a laugh, and even know some right away. Contact me at my YouTube (www.youtube.com/inzonex) and I will put up plenty of videos showcasing the laughs.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.187.69.81 (talk) 02:18, 27 March 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for confirming this. It is no secret that many live shows are still sweetened today. You're link at Youtube is verification within itself, so the article passes the WP:V test.Oanabay04 (talk) 20:42, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  THIS IS HOW IT WORKS! 

message: Laugh-track question at Talk:Fire Me...Please. --EarthFurst (talk) 20:47, 6 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  first reality show with laugh track? 

message: I know that later episodes of Sanford and Son (particularly the final season) had some sweetening done, you can hear a belly laugh of a "HAAAAAAAAAAAA!" dubbed repeatedly, but were earlier episodes sweetened with Charley Douglass's laughs? I was watching an early episode the other day where Fred and Lamont fly to St. Louis regarding the will of Fred's deceased uncle, and thought I heard a mild Douglass laugh or two added to the soundtrack.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.203.212.215 (talk) 18:09, 30 July 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: This is very true about many shows throughout the 90s. They were "sweetened" to add additional, louder laughter. This has been confirmed and WP:V several times over.Oanabay04 (talk) 20:40, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sanford and Son 

message: The Soup, The Dish, and Web Soup all have laughter. Is it canned?
There was a gag that a person could buy a Spencer's or a magic shop that, when shaken, would laughter like a sitcom audience. No mention of this silly device that many teachers used to take away from class clowns?
On GarageBand '06 (I'm not sure of other versions), there's a way to do canned laughter with the keyboard. The movie, Date Movie, uses this laughter in a special audio track on the DVD. (I myself have used it for a project where I took Pulp Fiction and added laughter and cheering and boos throughout the whole film. What a pain, but was quite worth it.)
That's all I can think of. Toodles. Apple8800 (talk) 23:56, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  E! 

message: Here's something to ponder. Why was Hanna-Barbera cheap in doing a laugh track for their 1970's line of cartoons? Why couldn't they have just kept utilizing a full laugh track? If Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, The Banana Splits, and Josie and the Pussycats were successful hits, then they could've kept using a full laugh track. They did not need to deal with a limited inferior-sounding one. Evanaeus (talk) 19:48, 31 January 2011
*There is little written on this, but the basic word was that Douglass charged a great deal for usage of his mysterious box. Since Saturday morning cartoons had a less attentive, mature audience, Hanna-Barbera and others did not put much effort into "orchestrating" a quality laugh track.Oanabay04 (talk) 20:39, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hanna-Barbera made a mistake... 

message: This article is almost exclusively about the USA, but doesn't say so. It treats three other countries effectively as foreign oddities, and doesn't cover the rest of the world at all. It's also written far more like a magazine article than an encyclopaedic one. How about "Critics took note of the inferior sounding laugh track permeating Hanna-Barbera's Saturday morning fare"? It's not even sourced. I laughed out loud when I read the suggestion above that this could be a featured article. HiLo48 (talk) 09:03, 13 August 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Television is U.S.-centric by definition.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.143.126.236 (talk) 07:05, 2 October 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that this is heavily US-centric. As such I'm boldly adding an appropriate warning template.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.111.185.74 (talk) 08:47, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: The U.S. influence has been noted as such in the article. It should be noted overall that the laugh track is very much a U.S. invention and phenomenon. Very little has been written about laugh tracks outside of the U.S., since they are not used in any great abundance anywhere but the U.S. By default, the article is almost exclusively about the U.S.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.143.126.236 (talk)  is 100% correct in stating that television is U.S.-centric by definition. The birth of the laugh track goes hand in hand with the birth of television; they are inseperable.Oanabay04 (talk) 04:22, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  US-centrism, and journalistic style 

message: The picture in the Hogan's Heroes section is not of the pilot episode. I feel that since this section is all about the pilot episode, it should have an actual frame  from it. The current picture is a picture taken during the filming of a later first-season episode.
I could not find a pilot-episode still on Commons. Perhaps someone can help with a picture of their own?
24.245.45.131 (talk) 19:02, 26 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Hogan's Heroes" section picture is wrong 

message: I seem to recall that in an anniversary special about M*A*S*H, one of the people involved with the show said he didn't like laugh tracks because they were used "because the audience is too stupid to know when to laugh". That could be Larry Gelbart, since he's cited in the article as not wanting to use one but had to. Can anyone else verify this? It's possibly the 30th Anniversary from 2002 and it might be the same special where David Ogden Stiers said he wished there could be a moratorium on talking about TV shows. I guess he was a bit tired of discussing M*A*S*H. —RRabbit42 (talk) 08:30, 21 January 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Point against laugh tracks 

message: "they can give people pointers about what's funny and help them along"
Have people always been this stupid?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.187.100.235 (talk) 17:07, 3 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Help them along 

message: What is it called when pre-recorded sounds of indignation are used (like in Let Them Talk (TV series))? --AVRS (talk) 19:27, 23 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Boo track 

message: I beleive it would be worth  investigating whether or not we can find an appropriate public-domain audio file for this article. An audio file example  of a laugh track would greatly benifit the article.SecretName101 (talk) 07:20, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Audio file 

message: In recent years I find lots of videos on YouTube where the laughs tracks were artificially deleted. For example this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgKgXehYnnw
A surprising number of people see those videos and think: shows like Friends are not funny at all. Because if you watch these videos, you hardly feel any urge to laugh. It's just actors making faces and very weird pauses after moderately funny lines.
But this is a false conclusion. Two reasons. First: Especially comedy is extremely time sensitive. A wrong pause can ruin nearly every joke. Instead of removing artificial laughter those videos insert artifical pauses. Second: Some of these shows are still recorded in front of a live audience. The "no laugh" videos do not show the original version of the show. The actors on Friends had to make pauses because a real audience was laughing. When the audience didn't laugh, the scenes were sometimes changed on the fly. How it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K_7w6zQIuw --2A0A:A543:CFA5:0:76D4:35FF:FE03:2B7E (talk) 14:57, 11 November 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  "No laugh" videos on YouTube 

message: the "laff box" section has some weirdly pro-Charley Douglass statements, and the title of the section itself is also pretty weird all things considered. --Bumpf said this!  ooh clicky clicky!  [insert witty meta-text on wiki-sigs here] 21:24, 4 April 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Non encyclopedic part