In my TV-saturated youth, there were few phrases more recognizable than this one: "This program was taped before a live studio audience." That guffawing crowd serves as TV comedy's most calming, coaxing companion, known popularly as the laugh track.
There's a rumor that all laugh tracks come from the O.G. live studio audiences of the '50s and that the voices belong mostly to modern-day corpses, ringing from beyond the grave. But from what I can tell from my experience here in Los Angeles, this isn't always true. For the most part, today's multi-camera sitcoms tape one day a week, with a straight-through rehearsal show followed by a filmed run for the audience.
One of the few exceptions is "How I Met Your Mother," an otherwise traditional multi-cam with too many scenes, cutaway gags, flashbacks and special effects to cater to an audience — let alone to shoot something on one day (the filming schedule runs from Wednesday through Friday). On my Wednesdays on set, I get to be a part of the closest thing the cast gets to an audience, and I actually get to laugh.
On set, most jokes flow without pause for laughter, applause or those hateful, scandalized "ooh!" noises. Instead, the show is roughly pieced together into a coherent whole, and then Emmy-nominated editor Susan Federman adds in the laughs.
Sue has a large library of crowd reactions borrowed from another show that her assistant, Steely, worked on. She goes through the episode and drops in laughs at her discretion, aiming to highlight punchlines without stepping on the next set-up. Occasionally, jokes are so close together that she lets them fly by without a laugh, but while watching her work, I was surprised at how little of the show wasn't punctuated (violated?) by the laugh track.
As a fan, I've always admired "HIMYM" because, though the laughs are there, they're easy to ignore because I'm laughing on my own. The writing is sharp enough that the laughs don't echo in a cerebral silence. The worst laugh tracks, like those on the first season of Aaron Sorkin's "Sports Night," highlight the wrong elements and don't know how to react to the right ones. It's no surprise that acclaimed comedies — including the freshmen "Modern Family" and "Community" — are laugh track-free single-cams. Generally, that format rewards smart writing, rather than punishing it.
Yesterday I spent a good hour or so watching Sue drop in laughs, weighing the options between one prerecorded reaction and another, listening to the timing and crescendos of each sound bite. It's odd to hear laughs disembodied because they have such a thoroughly lively, human sound. I couldn't quite tell if the laughs were so loud for Sue's benefit, or if they were always like that. In fact, since I've started working on the show, the laughs on aired episodes just seem louder to me.
Obviously, TV's original studio audiences bridged the stylistic gap between the new medium and vaudeville, its direct predecessor. Why do the TV suits think laugh tracks are still needed? Do they not trust us to laugh all on our own?
Personally, I hate watching comedy alone. My "HIMYM" viewing group back at school is consistently six or seven strong, and I tend to only laugh out loud if I'm laughing with others. But with the advent of watch-when-you-want technologies, television is steadily becoming a more solitary medium. Maybe, with shows like "HIMYM" that are actually funny — as opposed to shows like the new "Accidentally On Purpose," which aren't — we need those invisible companions to feel comfortable enough to react. We are our own live studio audiences, keeping the laughs alive.
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Rebecca Goldberg is a junior majoring in American studies. She can be reached at Rebecca.Goldberg@tufts.edu.
