Wishing Fake Laughter Would Kick The Can

I should start by admitting that I don’t watch a whole lot of television. In fact, the majority of time I spend with my hand on the remote is watching films, not news programs, primetime television, or late night. I watch the Super Bowl and the Oscars, but these hardly put me in the company of hardcore TV junkies. But that won’t stop me from proposing that laugh tracks are the worst thing going in television.

The laugh track, or canned laughter, as it’s sometimes called, was invented by Charles Douglass more than six decades ago. Working with a collection of recorded laughter, Douglass would ease the edits between scenes by adding the prerecorded laughter over the actual live studio sounds. But even when studios largely ditched live sitcom shows, the laughter stayed with them. And we could never get away.

From left to right, Charlie Sheen, Jon Cryer, and Angus T. Jones in the show Two and a Half Men; via google.com

Waiting for Wilfred to begin last Thursday night, my brother Manning and I were greeted by Charlie Sheen’s loudmouth “Charlie Harper” from Two and a Half Men, which is, by many accounts, one of the most successful TV comedies of the decade. And thundering after every one-liner is a swarm of feverish canned laughter. Sometimes it’s more like a single woman with a case of the giggles or a guffawing family. There are degrees of canned laughter, for sure—but there is never no laughter.

~

While we can concentrate on how annoying that laughter is, I would rather consider how Douglass has us all trained to sense a television’s humor à la Pavlov. But my complaint is not merely that we have been trained to sense the humor; I object to our seeming satisfaction with the mere observation of humor. I cannot recall a time that I was moved to laughter by television show employing canned laughter. My experience with these shows is that the fake laughter forces me to recognize the humor of the show rather than laugh at it.

The cast of Modern Family; via unrealitymag.com

 My preference, as you’ve doubtless already guessed, is for shows like Wilfred, that have abandoned canned laughter entirely. Even more so than a show like Wilfred, I’m a fan of the mockumentary-style show like The Office or Modern Family.

Perhaps it all has to due with me rejecting the seemingly boilerplate attitude of a sitcom like Two and a Half Men, but I think the root of my love for these “track-less” shows arises out of the show’s willingness to treat me as a real audience. Watching The Office, I am no longer waiting on Mr. Douglass’s well-meaning invention to tell me when I should think something is funny or not—or even when I should think it’s merely funny and not hysterical. Shows lacking canned laughter do not have the ease of these simple judgments. In leaving decisions of humor up to the audience, a show makes a distinct move away from indifference towards something like respect for those watching.

~

The Office, I think it’s fair to say, respects me as a viewer. It does not toy with my emotions; it presents me a situation and allows me to read it for myself. Humor is not merely humor in The Office; humor is supplanted, at some level, by the reality of the characters. Jim’s pranks on Dwight are not funny because they are pranks, but because they are pranks on Dwight. Perhaps Jim is cruel to Dwight, but Dwight is never exactly cordial to Jim either. The show asks us (whether intentionally or not) to analyze these scenarios and respond with a laugh, or not.

One-liners in Two and a Half Men, I think (I have not watched more than half an episode), are excisable scraps that may be thoughtlessly recycled among one’s friends. When I see Charlie Harper with a broken nose in the hospital, the show seems only to care about the clever things he spouts before the laugh track swells the audio channel. When Andy punches through the wall in The Office, I laugh at the absurdity—but I also worry about his hand.

~