Growing up, every sitcom I watched had a laugh track. In fact, I think most of them had the same laugh track. My wife was watching a show and left the tv on. What followed was a new show I’d never seen before. The humour was bad, and the laugh track made it even more painful. I think the last sitcom to use a laugh track that actually didn’t take away from the comedy was The Big Bang Theory. But even there, I think they could totally have pulled it off without one.
Then came the commercials. Wow, they are awful. I really don’t watch a lot of TV, and when I do, it’s usually Netflix or some other streaming service that I don’t have to watch commercials on. Is there some sort of strategy whereby really bad commercials somehow work better than good ones?
Bad laugh tracks, bad commercials, bad sitcoms. How is TV going to survive in the next 5 years? Streaming services will be the way everyone watches their shows. I think most TV stations are going to go the way of the laugh track… and it won’t be a funny thing for them.
On the other hand, the old sitcoms I used to watch, like Friends, Seinfeld, and Cheers, are now the shows that my daughters are watching, or have watched. What’s funny about that is that I missed a lot of the shows because I didn’t see them on the night they played, and didn’t catch all the re-runs, but my kids watch episode by episode on demand. And that’s the difference now, shows can be watched any time, and without commercials.
The laugh track will live on in re-runs, but I think the days of the laugh track are long gone, and any good quality comedies of the future will rely on good humour and not a fake audience to cue the laughter of the viewer.
The demise of TV as we know it would not be a bad thing. I gave up television about 12 years ago and do not miss it. Occasionally I will watch a movie on my computer through a streaming service. Prior to COVID when I would travel for work and stay in a hotel, I would occasionally turn the TV on and just end up channel surfing never finding anything that I really wanted to watch. But hey, that is just me.
I think it’s more than just you. What’s interesting is that while TV dies, screen time has been growing significantly… people are, as Neil Postman and Aldous Huxley would suggest, still wanting to ‘amuse themselves to death’.
My husband and I recently tried to watch a Christmas series on Netflix that, surprisingly, had a laugh track. We couldn’t do it as we found it really annoying and obtrusive. I suppose there is a range of quality in laugh tracks or ones that might be easier to tune out, but I generally find them annoying and won’t miss them if they do fade away. Rather odd to think they became a thing! Thanks for the post to make me think about them a bit more and weigh in 🙂
Yes, how did they become a thing? It’s like, ‘it’s only funny when we tell you it’s funny’. How very weird!
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