Laugh Track

Because canned laughter is mostly a thing of the past, most “without laugh track” clips are really nothing of the kind (just audience laughter muted). But this extended scene from last night’s How I Met Your Mother actually is without the laugh track, provided by an audience watching the finished episode. So here’s what it’s like.

One of my pet peeves, as a sitcom fan, is the inaccurate use of the term “laugh track.” A laugh track is laughter added to a show to simulate the effect of a live audience, even though it was shot without one. It is not the sound of actual people in the audience laughing at the material as it is filmed. And yet you constantly hear people talking about studio audience laughter as if it’s exactly the same thing as laughter added in post-production. Worse, you hear people criticizing the “laugh tracks” on shows whose entire style, rhythm and timing are influenced by the decision to shoot with an audience, and would clearly be very different if there were no audience present (and therefore no laughter) on the soundtrack. Then you get people who tell us that show X would be better if they would stop using such fake-sounding laughs, when the laughing is real and the actors are obviously reacting to it.

Following up on my post about comedies that have the laughter too distantly miked, ABC’s extremely bland but reasonably-performing new show Surviving Suburbia provides an example of that: even when a line gets an enthusiastic response (deserved or not) from the audience, the laughs are so far away that it sounds like a bad laugh track. It doesn’t help that ABC keeps trying to revive its old style of domestic comedy on film, rather than tape; I don’t know the technical reasons for it, but film has a way of making everything sound more distant than videotape, where both the voices and the laughter can sound more “present.” It’s not going to happen in the HD era, but I still think some sitcoms would be better off taking a cue from the late lamented Lucky Louie and shooting on videotape.