this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
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I saw some clips of Friends in which the laugh track had been edited out. Let me just say that this meme is well-justified.
Idk it's pretty funny quit crushing my childhood
It's a live audience, not a laugh track.
It's a live audience and a laugh track.
Yes, The majority of Friends was filmed in front of a live audience, with the exception of a few shots filmed on location here and there. I saw a recent interview with Lisa Kudrow where she talks about being frustrated on stage because of all the pauses for audience laughter, where the actors would have to pause and do some idle animation. That a television show taped before a live audience is expected to be different than a stage play.
I've also seen a "behind the scenes" video, I think as a special feature of the DVD releases, where they would swap out audience reactions. Because, for example, the take where Monica pops out from under the sheets with Chandler, revealing the two were sleeping together, the live audience went nuts for several solid minutes. For the broadcast version, they inserted an uproarious but brief cheer to keep the pacing up.
Compared to MASH or the Flintstones (!!?!), Friends' laugh track is a lot more genuine but it was at least somewhat engineered.
It's still a laugh track. The laughing is captured live, but presumably with a different microphone. They then mix the laugh track with the character's voices to get the levels they want.
They also record the same scene multiple times, so the laughs may even be from a different take.
…and not necessarily even from the same joke or scene. All you can say with a „live studio audience“ is that the laugh you hear will have been recorded that night. Maybe even from the warm-up act.
That's also a high sell. Some sound engineer somewhere definitely has a favourite laughtrack they like to use. There's bound to be inside jokes as well.
What you can say is that it's more genuine than a single overused laugh track. In fact, it's probably the simplest way to get variety - just use the actual laughs when they're okay, and swap those "not okay" with ones from older takes/scenes/episodes.
I've mentioned this before and faced fierce pushback from friends fans. The laugh track causes such pacing issues it's so distracting.
I hate laugh tracks - but most of the show (as far as I can tell) is in front of a studio audience
Ah yeah, I believe they have a light that goes on that tells them when to laugh since the material isn't funny enough on its own 😂
That’s brutal. Not having known about the ‘applause’ light, I can see that because some of Phoebe’s jokes were so bad and the audience just cracks up…
That said, it’s still way better than ‘big bang theory’ with pre-recorded laugh that they drop whenever… like nails down a chalkboard
I'm not convinced that's the case for Friends. I'll again refer to the DVD special features, there's one where they show how the studio audience helps rewrite the final cut of the show.
The example given is, they're in Vegas, Chandler and Monica are thinking about getting married, to the point Monica is wearing a "borrowed" blue sweatshirt, when Ross and Rachel barge in, faces covered in marker, having just gotten spur of the moment drunk Vegas married.
In the script, Chandler's line is "I think they're drunk." This got a cool reaction from the audience; in this moment Monica would deliver a straight line and Chandler would quip off of it. So they did another take where Matthew Perry improvised the line "I think they're two bottles of vodka in human form." which got a larger audience reaction, and that's the take that was broadcast.