Shows like The Simpsons accelerated the trend toward laughless sitcoms. The Office, Parks and Rec, Malcolm in the Middle, and Modern Family picked up the baton, trusting the audience in the way George Burns suggested half a century ago.
Check out this year’s Emmy nominees for Outstanding Comedy Series: Ted Lasso, PEN15, The Flight Attendant, Black-ish, Cobra Kai, Hacks, Emily In Paris, and The Kominsky Method. Not a single canned laugh (or any laughs in Emily In Paris) in the bunch. But the laugh track is not dead yet. At least not if CBS has anything to say about it. From recent hits How I Met Your Mother to Two and a Half Men to Big Bang Theory, the network still believes there’s an audience for sitcoms that drop in audience laughs.
ABC
Doesn’t that make those sitcoms seem old-fashioned? “Whenever anybody would make that argument,” says producer Chuck Lorre, “the first thing I would say is that Big Bang Theory has been sitting at top or near the top of the ratings.” But fake laughs aren’t allowed, Lorre insists. “I do not, and have never, sweetened my shows with fake laughs. I’ve always thought it was a pretty hateful and self-defeating practice.”
If anything, today’s laugh tracks, when they exist at all, are going in the other direction from the Laff Box days. Think of it as almost anti-sweetening. Check out an episode of How I Met Your Mother, a show shot in an empty studio, suggests Josef Adalian. Audio engineers added laughs, but they were “digitally massaged … mellow, hoots and catcalls virtually absent.”
It’s the same old song but stripped down for a more authentic sound. Imagine an overwrought musical score distracting from the drama playing out on screen vs. a musical backdrop that enhances a story’s natural tension and release. Not unlike Douglass’s playing the Laff Box like a church organ, today’s engineers are attempting to compose a more subtle score.
Maybe even David Niven would approve.
Top Image: Warner Bros. Television
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