Laugh tracks have gone from being extremely desirable to extremely tacky in the years that it’s been around. These tracks have been around since the 1950s when it was first invented by Charles Douglass who first named it the Laff Box- which is quite a hilarious typo if you really thought about it.

I never really paid attention to laugh tracks until i was shown an episode of Friends without one, quite unnerving if you ask me. It just felt like we were still waiting for a punchline that hasn’t arrived, or hasn’t been told properly. On the other hand, now you look at laugh tracks and scoff as if it devalues the quality of the sitcom. I fully agree that the absence of laugh tracks in comedy shows and sitcoms now show a sophistication in the viewer as he/she isn’t prompted by laugh tracks and laugh purely because of the comedic content of the show. This is backed up by the reading when it is mentioned, ‘ This lack of audible laughter was frequently cited in popular discourse of the period as evidence of a show’s quality, smartness, and respect for the viewer who now apparently laughs on her own volition and not when prompted to do so by a machine. ‘ ( Giotta G, 2017 )

The rise of popularity of the laugh track was mainly because comedy was seen as requiring ‘ intimacy and copresence‘ ( Giotta G 2017 ). Comedians would bounce of the live audiences’ responses while the audiences’ themselves vibed off each other’s laughs etc. For television shows specifically, the laugh track proved to be a form of controlled liveness which was sought after during that time because often, live audiences can prove to be unpredictable and detrimental to the production process.

The reading also mentions that a lot of television shows in the 1950s included laugh tracks because it was a form of a familiarity enhancing technique- technology was seen as something alien and ‘outside’ at the time and consumers/civilians had to be assured that this was not something radioactive that could kill therefore television shows would have presenters that were warm and prompted small talk, to have a sense of human-ness. In sitcoms, laugh tracks were used. Later on, voice over narration were used instead of laugh tracks and were said to be a ‘surrogate’ for them.

 

 

 

PS. I’ll link the episode of Friends without the laugh track because it is absolutely too funny not to watch.

References:

Giotta G, 2017, ” Sounding Live: An Institutional History of the Television Laugh Track”, Journal of Communication Inquiry, vol 41(4) 331-348.