These are the stupidest things our society has ever manufactured.
And—at least to me—there is one stupid idea that towers above all others. In practice, its impact is minor; in theory, it’s the most fucked-up media construction spawned by the twentieth century. And I’ve felt this way for (almost) my entire life.
I can’t think of anything philosophically stupider than laugh tracks.
2 Perhaps this seems like a shallow complaint to you. Perhaps you think that railing against canned laughter is like complaining that nuclear detonations are bad for the local bunny population. I don’t care. Go read a vampire novel. To me, laugh tracks are as stupid as we get. And, yes, I realize this phenomenon is being phased out by modernity. That’s good. There will be a day in the future when this essay will make no sense, because canned laughter will be as extinct as TV theme songs. It will only be used as a way to inform audiences that they’re supposed to be watching a fake TV show from the 1970s. But—right now, today—canned laughter is still a central component of escapist television. The most popular sitcom on TV, Two and a Half Men, still uses a laugh track, as does the (slightly) more credible How I Met Your Mother and the (significantly) less credible The Big Bang Theory. Forced laughter is also central to the three live-action syndicated shows that are broadcast more than any other, Friends, Home Improvement, and Seinfeld. Cheers will be repeated forever, as will the unseen people guffawing at its barroom banter. And I will always notice this, and it will never become reassuring or nostalgic or quaint. It will always seem stupid, because canned laughter represents the worst qualities of insecure people.
Now, I realize these qualities can be seen everywhere in life and within lots of complicated contexts. Insecurity is part of being alive. But it’s never less complicated than this. It’s never less complicated than a machine that tries to make you feel like you’re already enjoying something, simply because people you’ll never meet were convinced to laugh at something else entirely.
2A I am not the first writer who’s been perversely fascinated with fake laughter. Ron Rosenbaum1 wrote a story for Esquire in the 1970s titled “Inside the Canned Laughter War” that chronicled attempts by Ralph Waldo Emerson III2 to sell American TV networks on a new laughter device that was intended to usurp the original “Laff Box” designed by Charlie Douglass for the early fifties program The Hank McCune Show. Rosenbaum’s piece is apolitical, mainly memorable for mentioning that the voices heard on modern laugh tracks were often the same original voices recorded by Douglas during pre-ancient radio shows like Burns and Allen, which would mean that the sound we hear on laugh tracks is the sound of dead people laughing. As far as I can tell, this has never been proven. But it must be at least partially true; there must be at least a few people recorded for laugh tracks who are now dead, even if their laughter was recorded yesterday. People die all the time. If you watch any episode of Seinfeld, you can be 100 percent confidant that somebody chuckling in the background is six feet underground. I assume this makes Larry David ecstatic.
During the height of the Laff Box Era (the 1970s), lots of TV critics railed against the use of canned laughter, so much so that TV shows began making a concerted effort to always mention that they were taped in front of a live audience (although even those live tapings were almost always mechanically sweetened). At the time, the primary criticism was that laugh tracks were being used to mask bad writing—in Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s self-styled character chastises a colleague working in the TV industry for adding counterfeit hilarity to a terrible program (“Do you realize how immoral this all is?”). Less concrete aesthetes argued that the Laff Box obliterated the viewer’s suspension of disbelief, although it’s hard to imagine how realistically invested audiences were ever supposed to feel about Mork and Mindy. I concede that both of these condemnations were accurate. But those things never bothered me. Laugh tracks never detracted from bad writing, and they never stopped me from thinking the cast of Taxi weren’t legitimate taxi drivers. Those issues are minor. What bothers me is the underlying suggestion that what you are experiencing is different than whatever your mind tells you is actually happening. Moreover, laugh tracks want you to accept that this constructed reality can become the way you feel, or at least the way you behave. It’s a concept grounded in the darkest of perspectives: A laugh track assumes that you are not confident enough to sit quietly, even if your supposed peer group is (a) completely invisible and (b) theoretically dead.
1A I lived in eastern Germany for four months of 2008. There were a million weird things about living there, but there was one that I didn’t anticipate: Germans don’t fake-laugh. If someone in Germany is laughing, it’s because he or she physically can’t help themselves; they are laughing because they’re authentically amused. Nobody there ever laughs because of politeness. Nobody laughs out of obligation. And what this made me recognize is how much American laughter is purely conditioned. Most of our laughing—I would say at least 51 percent—has no relation to humor or to how we actually feel.
You really, really notice this in German grocery stores. When paying for food in Leipzig, I was struck by how much of my daily interaction was punctuated by laughter that was totally detached from what I was doing. I would buy some beer and cookies and give the clerk a twenty-euro note; inevitably, the clerk would ask if I had exact change, because Germans are obsessed with both exactness and money. I would reach into my pocket and discover I had no coins, so I would reply, “Um—heh heh heh. No. Sorry. Ha! Guess not.” I made these noises without thinking. Every single time, the clerk would just stare at me stoically. It had never before occurred to me how often I reflexively laugh; only in the absence of a response did I realize I was laughing for no reason whatsoever. It somehow felt comfortable. Now that I’m back in the U.S., I notice this all the time: People half-heartedly chuckle throughout most casual conversations, regardless of the topic. It’s a modern extension of the verbalized pause, built by TV laugh tracks. Everyone in America has three laughs: a real laugh, a fake real laugh, and a “filler laugh” they use during impersonal conversations. We have been trained to connect conversation with soft, interstitial laughter. It’s our way of showing the other person that we understand the context of the interaction, even when we don’t.
This is not the only reason Germans think Americans are retarded, but it’s definitely one of them.
2B Part of what makes the notion of canned laughter so mysterious is the way it continues to exist within a media world that regularly rewards shows that don’t employ it. Virtually every high-end, “sophisticated” comedy of the early twenty-first century—Arrested Development, It’s Always Suny in Philadelphia, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Simpsons, 30 Rock—is immune to canned laughter, and it’s difficult to imagine any of those shows supplemented with mechanical, antiseptic chuckling. Very often, the absence of a laugh track serves as a more effective guidepost than the laughter itself—audiences have come to understand that any situation comedy without canned laughter is supposed to be smarter, hipper, and less predictable than traditional versions of the genre. This comprehension began with the Korean War sitcom M*A*S*H, a series that started with the removal of canned laughter from scenes in the hospital operating room (so as not to mitigate the reality of people bleeding to death) and eventually excluded it from the entire broadcast altogether (in order to remind audiences that they were watching something quasi-political and semi-important). But this collective assumption raises two questions:
1. If TV audiences have come to accept that comedic shows without laugh tracks are edgier and more meaningful, is it not possible that the reverse would also be true (in other words, does removing the laugh track change the way a viewer preconceives the show, regardless of its content)?
2. If all the best comedies are devoid of fake laughter, why would anyone elect to use them at all (under any circumstance)?
What’s interesting about these two queries is the way their answers are connected. The answer to the first questio
n is, “Absolutely.” If you watch a comedy that forgoes contrived laughter, you will unconsciously (or maybe even consciously) take it more seriously. Jokes will be interpreted as meaner, weirder, and deeper than however they were originally written. When Liz Lemon says something on 30 Rock that isn’t funny, there’s always the paradoxical possibility that this was intentional; perhaps Tina Fey is commenting on the inanity of the “sitcom joke construct” and purposefully interjecting a joke that failed, thereby making the failure of her joke the part that’s supposed to be funny. The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm deliver “the humor of humiliation” without contextual cues, so the events can be absorbed as hilarious in the present and cleverly tragic in the retrospective future. These are things we all immediately understand the moment we start watching a TV comedy without a laugh track: The product is multidimensional. We can decide what parts are funny; in fact, the program can even be enjoyed if none of the parts are funny, assuming the writing is propulsive or unusual (this was the case with Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night, an ABC satire that debuted with a laugh track but slowly eliminated the chuckles over its two-year run). We all take laughless sitcoms more seriously because they seem to take us more seriously. They imply that we will know (and can actively decide) what is (or isn’t) funny.
Which directs us to the answer of question two.
The reason a handful of very popular sitcoms still use canned laughter—and the reason why veteran network leaders always want to use laugh tracks, even though doing so immediately ghettoizes their programming—is due to a specific assumption about human nature. The assumption is this: Normal people don’t have enough confidence to know what they think is funny. And this, sadly, is true. But it’s not their fault.
2C Friends (at least during the early stages of its ten-season run) was taped in front of a live studio audience. This, of course, does not make its laughter (deserved or undeserved) any less fake: Studio audiences are prompted to laugh at everything, want to laugh at everything, and are mechanically fixed (“sweetened”) whenever they fail to perform at optimal levels of outward hilarity assessment. Friends had a laugh track the same way The Flintstones had a laugh track—it’s just that the prefab laughs you heard on Friends were being manufactured on location, in real time. For anyone watching at home, there was no difference.
Now, the best episodes of Friends were funny. The worst episodes were insulting to baboons. But the vast majority fall somewhere in between. Here is an example of a Friends script from season two; this episode was titled “The One Where Old Yeller Dies” and takes place when the series was still a conventional sitcom (as opposed to more of a serial comedy, which started during season three). The mention of a character named “Richard” refers to Tom Selleck, who played Monica’s boyfriend for much of that season. This is the first scene following the opening credits . . .
[Scene: Inside Monica and Rachel’s apartment. Richard is on the balcony smoking and Monica is on the phone.]
MONICA: Hey, have you guys eaten, because uh, Richard and I just finished and we’ve got leftovers . . . Chicken and potatoes . . . What am I wearing? . . . Actually, nothing but rubber gloves.
[Chandler and Joey come sprinting into the apartment from across the hall.]
JOEY: Ya know, one of these times you’re gonna really be naked and we’re not gonna come over.
MONICA: Alright, I’ve got a leg, three breasts and a wing.
CHANDLER: Well, how do you find clothes that fit?
JOEY: Oh, hey, Monica, we’ve got a question.
MONICA: Alright, for the bizillionth time—yes, I see other women in the shower at the gym, and no, I don’t look.
JOEY: No, not that one. We’re trying to figure out who to bring to the Knicks game tonight. We have an extra ticket.
The degree to which you find this passage funny is directly proportional to (a) how familiar you are with this show and (b) how much you recall liking it. Like almost all successful TV ensembles, the plots on Friends weren’t a fraction as important as the characters and who played them—especially as the seasons wore on, the humor came from our familiarity with these characters’ archetypes. People who liked Friends literally liked the friends. Audiences watched the show because they felt like they had a relationship with the cast. The stories were mostly extraneous. But there still had to be a story somewhere. There still had to be something for these people to do, so the show adopted a structure. This is the structure of the previous scene, minus the dialogue:
[Scene: Inside Monica and Rachel’s apartment. Richard is on the balcony smoking and Monica is on the phone.]
MONICA: STATIC INTRO, PLUS JOKE
(small laugh)
[MOMENT OF PHYSICAL COMEDY]
(exaggerated laugh)
JOEY: JOKE BASED IN PREEXISTING KNOWLEDGE OF CHARACTER’S PERSONA
(laugh)
MONICA: SETUP
CHANDLER: OLD-TIMEY JOKE
(laugh)
JOEY: MINOR PLOT POINT
MONICA: UNRELATED JOKE
(laugh)
JOEY: BEGINNING OF STORY ARC FOR EPISODE
Using this template, it seems like anyone could create their own episode of Friends, almost like they were filling out a Mad Libs. And if those Mad Libs lines were actually said by Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, and Matthew Perry, the result would probably be no less effective (were they especially absurd, the net might even be positive). The key to this kind of programming is never what people are saying. They key is (a) which people are doing the talking, and (b) the laugh track.
There are important assumptions we bring into the show as viewers; we are assuming that this is escapist (read: nonincendiary) humor, we are assuming the characters are ultimately good people, and we’re assuming that our relationship to Friends mirrors the traditional relationship Americans have always had with thirty-minute TV programs that employ canned laughter. It’s not always funny, but it’s in the “form of funny.” And because we’re not stupid, we know when to chuckle. But we don’t even have to do that, because the laugh track does it for us. And over time, that starts to feel normal. It starts to make us laugh at other things that aren’t necessarily funny.
1B Earlier in this essay I mentioned how I’ve believed that canned laughter was idiotic for “(almost) my entire life.” The key word there is almost. I did not think laugh tracks were idiotic when I was five. In fact, when I was five, I thought I was partially responsible for the existence of laugh tracks. I thought we all were.
At the time, my assumption was that the speaker on my parents’ Zenith television was a two-way system—I thought it was like a telephone. When I watched Laverne and Shirley or WKRP in Cincinnati and heard the canned laughter, my hypothesis was that this was the sound of thousands of other TV viewers in random locations, laughing at the program in their own individual living rooms. I thought their laughter was being picked up by their various TV consoles and being simultaneously rebroadcast through mine. As a consequence, I would sometimes sit very close to the television and laugh as hard as I could, directly into the TV’s speaker. I would laugh into my own television.
My family thought I just really, really appreciated Howard Hesseman.
And I did. But I mostly wanted to contribute to society.
3 In New York, you get used to people pretending to laugh. Go see a foreign movie with poorly translated English subtitles and you will hear a handful of people howling at jokes that don’t translate, solely because they want to show the rest of the audience that they’re smart enough to understand a better joke was originally designed to be there. Watch The Daily Show in an apartment full of young progressives and you’ll hear them consciously (and unconvincingly) over-laugh at every joke that’s delivered, mostly to assure everyone else that they’re appropriately informed and predictably leftist. Take a lunch meeting with anyone involved in any form of media that isn’t a daily newspaper, and they will pretend to laugh at everything anyone at the table says that could be theoretically classifi
ed as humorous, even if the alleged joke is about how airline food isn’t delicious. The only thing people in New York won’t laugh at are unfamous stand-up comedians; we really despise those motherfuckers, for some reason.
It’s possible the reason people in New York laugh at everything is because they’re especially polite, but that seems pretty unlikely. A better explanation is that New York is the most mediated city in America, which means its population is the most media-savvy—and the most media-affected—populace in the country. The more media someone consumes (regardless of who they are or where they live), the more likely they are to take their interpersonal human cues from external, nonhuman sources. One of the principal functions of mass media is to make the world a more fathomable reality—in the short term, it provides assurance and simplicity. But this has a long-term, paradoxical downside. Over time, embracing mass media in its entirety makes people more confused and less secure. The laugh track is our best example. In the short term, it affirms that the TV program we’re watching is intended to be funny and can be experienced with low stakes. It takes away the unconscious pressure of understanding context and tells the audience when they should be amused. But because everything is laughed at in the same way (regardless of value), and because we all watch TV with the recognition that this is mass entertainment, it makes it harder to deduce what we think is independently funny. As a result, Americans of all social classes compensate by living like bipedal Laff Boxes: We mechanically laugh at everything, just to show that we know what’s supposed to be happening. We get the joke, even if there is no joke.
Chuck Klosterman on Film and Television Page 14