I think most reasonable people can agree that putting a laugh track on a lousy sitcom doesn’t make it any funnier. But I’m sure the same people can also agree that there have been some sitcoms with laugh tracks that were consistantly funny.
So here’s the game. Which sitcoms with laugh tracks have made you laugh on a regular basis? The occasional chuckle doesn’t count, and if it doesn’t have a laugh track it doesn’t count either (so no Arrested Development or The Simpsons). My list includes, but is not limited to:
Married…with Children
Roseanne
The Cosby Show
Herman’s Head
Spin City
I was fairly sure that some of the shows listed here actually had life studio audiences: Cheers, The Cosby Show, and Roseanne in particular. (Maybe not Roseanne, but the first two in particular usually set the action in just one or two sets, and feels kinda stage-bound.)
Fresh Prince of Bel Air probably had a laugh track, and it was funny.
I’ve never watched MASH much, but I recently caught a few early episodes, and the laugh tracks are atrocious. They were so painfully, obviously fake it was distracting.
Just because they have a live studio audience doesn’t mean they don’t use a laugh track. If the audience didn’t laugh at what the writers/producers/directors thoguht was a god joke, in goe the laugh track. Hell, they might even just dub in a recording of the actual audience’s laughter from a previous joke, that way it still sounds like the same audience.
Ah, interesting. That might explain something I’ve always wondered about Seinfeld. A show that uses as many quick cuts and set as that one does has got to have some sort of laugh track, but the scenes in Jerry’s apartment and the diner appear to have a live studio audience of sorts. (Plus, I seem to remember in the build up to the final episode seeing shots of an audience watching.) So there must be some mix of live audience and laugh track there as well.
I can’t remember if Barney Miller had a laugh track or not*, but none of these shows come remotely close to matching it in laughs. Wittiest show ever, IMO. Particularly not Friends. Yuck.
I never get to see it. They’ve only released one season on DVD, and altho I have it, I want more!
Whenever I’ve watched this, I’ve felt like the laugh track was very quiet, somehow, not fake of full of hired laffers like other shows (Night Court had that one guy you could always hear). So it never bothered me much, like the laugh track was modulated to match the not-cartoony nature of the show.
Didn’t WKRP have a laugh track? I thought it was funny.
CBS execs wanted MAS*H to have a laugh track but Larry Gelbart and the other producers refused. Both sides reached a compromise, the end result of which was television’s first giggle track.
