Plenty of great comedies have laugh tracks. Alan Partridge, The IT Crowd, Mr. Bean, Black Books, Only Fools & Horses, Blackadder, Red Dwarf, Fawlty Towers, Father Ted, to name a few.
After a couple decades of watching movies and shows without laugh tracks I tried to watch Blackadder and the IT Crowd and the audience laughter killed my enjoyment. They were funny, but not funny enough to get past the audience getting in the way of the humor.
The IT Crowd didn’t use canned laugh tracks, They recorded audio of audience responses.
There’s a reason why stand-up comedians film their specials in front of an audience and don’t film themselves telling jokes in an empty room. The latter wouldn’t be seen as funny even if the jokes were the same.
Comedians doing standup are including laughter based on their audience enjoying their comedy. Even shows that were filmed in front of a studio audience with prompts to laugh are likely to get some genuine laughs.
Sitcoms that use canned laughter are trying to force the audience to think they are funny, even when they aren’t.
I hate that this is true. Why are we like this.
Apes together strong
Also, a lot of the time it doesn’t mean there isn’t a real studio audience actually laughing at the performance. It’s just much easier to layer in canned laughter than record the actual live audience. This isn’t the case for stuff like SNL but a lot of live to tape stuff will use canned or prerecorded audience noise on top of a real audience.
Writers are definitely not the people making that choice.
Reminds me of this:
Writers… AI auto script generator
