this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
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Plenty of great comedies have laugh tracks. Alan Partridge, The IT Crowd, Mr. Bean, Black Books, Only Fools & Horses, Blackadder, Red Dwarf, Fawlty Towers, Father Ted, to name a few.
After a couple decades of watching movies and shows without laugh tracks I tried to watch Blackadder and the IT Crowd and the audience laughter killed my enjoyment. They were funny, but not funny enough to get past the audience getting in the way of the humor.
Married with children is another example. Would love to do a rewatch, but after a few episodes it's a little too much.
Even more, because the show aired around the time, where they started testing different kinds of audience laughter. Like putting the random guy that keeps on laughing, goes uh uh uh or is extra loud and whistles.
Edit: to be fair, iirc most jokes Al Bundy makes DO work well with audience laughter, because he's like telling the joke directly to the audience.
Yeah, a lot of sitcoms were basically throwing one liners at each other to get an audience reaction.
IT Crowd's first few episodes that I watched would have worked a lot better without audience laughter in my opinion.
The IT Crowd didn't use canned laugh tracks, They recorded audio of audience responses.
https://youtu.be/sIQNXH8yHsk?t=156
A lot of shows were "filmed in front of a live studio audience". I don't think that makes it better than canned laughs. It affects the pacing of the jokes, where the characters will tell a joke, wait for laughs, tell the next joke, etc. Any time I see that now, it makes the show feel dated, but that doesn't mean it was a bad show.
I understand where you're coming from: If natural dialogue is preferred for a creative work, then having laughter audio is inappropriate.
I disagree that canned laughter and live audience laughter are equivalent.
With live audience reactions it's like watching a theatre presentation, you get to be part of the crowd. We get a chance to laugh at the jokes at a natural pace (allowing for pauses so we don't miss the next joke) that the audience would set, and their reactions are modulated organically.
Canned laughter doesn't do this, it doesn't set a natural pace. It is calculated by an audio engineer, and the laughter will be an unnatural reaction to the joke presented.
It's the difference between a genuine and forced smile. We can naturally sense something is off. A live audience reaction is superior to canned laughter in most cases.
That being said, some shows don't need laughter audio to be enjoyable.