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.
Married with children is another example. Would love to do a rewatch, but after a few episodes it's a little too much.
Even more, because the show aired around the time, where they started testing different kinds of audience laughter. Like putting the random guy that keeps on laughing, goes uh uh uh or is extra loud and whistles.
Edit: to be fair, iirc most jokes Al Bundy makes DO work well with audience laughter, because he's like telling the joke directly to the audience.
The IT Crowd didn't use canned laugh tracks, They recorded audio of audience responses.
A lot of shows were "filmed in front of a live studio audience". I don't think that makes it better than canned laughs. It affects the pacing of the jokes, where the characters will tell a joke, wait for laughs, tell the next joke, etc. Any time I see that now, it makes the show feel dated, but that doesn't mean it was a bad show.
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.
Reminds me of this:
Writers are definitely not the people making that choice.
Writers...... AI auto script generator
