Pondering the laugh track

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on December 22nd, 2009

Excellent article in Reason by Greg Beato on canned laughter. It seems we’ve always been aware of the laugh track and we’ve been aware of the dude that created the machine that provided most of the tracks.

Now, the laugh track is edging over into The Land Of Irony. Or so Beato would have us believe.

We’ve never been offended by it. Some folks have. Paul Krassner, for one:

Canned laughter is the lowest form of fascism. It is propaganda that falsely– almost subliminally– implies something is funny when it isn’t. It is TV’s ultimate insult to the audience.

Calm down, dude… have another hit on the bong and your anger will pass.

Standup comics (which Krassner claims to be) are well aware of the vagaries of crowd dynamics. When one audience member laughs, it can be rather uncomfortable… for him, for the comic, for the audience. When that cascade of laughter comes– when the entire room laughs after being kick-started by the first audience member to get to the heart of the punchline– it is great. That first pioneer gives the assembled “permission” to yock it up. Crowd dynamics are a strange beast. Now, multiply that by millions– an audience watching at home– and tell us that the laugh track isn’t genius.

If it had been divised in the age of the internet, it would have been called, “a virtual audience.” As it was concocted in the early days of television, however, it was labeled “canned laughter,” and ridiculed by folks like Krassner and others who got way too upset about things that were, after all, harmless.

We don’t depend on the laugh track. We enjoy a lot of shows that don’t use it. We’re not turned off by shows that do use it. And, as for live performances, we can often sit stone-faced in a room full of howling patrons, or we might find ourselves to be the only people in the room howling at the comic onstage. In other words, we have never really depended on cues– canned or otherwise.

Google “canned laughter” and you’ll see a lot of anti-laugh track screeds. So horrified are some Krassner-types (and so eager to condemn the laugh track) that they’ll say things like, “Only the first six seasons of M*A*S*H used a laugh track.” And they’ll post that the DVD collection of Get A Life gives the viewer the option of watching with or without the laugh track.

Hey: Had Better Off Ted been able to find a larger audience with canned laughter, it would have been a small price to pay.

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