It used to be that nearly all sitcoms had canned laughter. Perhaps it’s due to my ignorance (I started watching sitcoms in the mid-90s) but the only pre-2000 sitcom I remember not usng the Can was Dream on (it was very much intended for adults). Now it seems that only dubious sitcoms starring Charlie Sheen have it.
Why? How did it come about?
Why did it start and become a staple for such a long time and why did it then stop?
I don’t know, but I hate it so much I can’t even watch Big Bang Theory. And I’d like to, but…no frickng way. That laughter is so annoying.
There was a switch from three-camera shows shot in front of a studio audience to single-camera shows that play more like a movie.
The three-camera shows work like a play, where the audience laughs; the single-camera shows work like a movie, which most people see at home these days.
I grew up on laugh tracks, and don’t find the current ones a problem. They’re much more subtle than they were in the 60s and 70s, when there would be roars of laughter over the weakest jokes – even jokes that weren’t intended to get the Big Laffs. Nowadays, they use them more judiciously.
As for origins, they date back to the earliest years of TV. People tend to laugh louder when in a crowd that’s also laughing and the laugh track was standard procedure by the mid-50s
I don’t mind laugh tracks at all - they’re a convention of the form. My two favorite sitcoms on the air today (**BBT **and How I Met Your Mother) have three cameras and a laugh track; I don’t see the art form disappearing in the near future, and I don’t see why it should.
Actually, Two and a Half Men doesn’t use canned laughter. It’s shot in front of an audience.
“Canned laughter” was used in TV for many years for shows that were filmed without an audience, like a movie. The networks wanted to make it clear that these shows were comedies and not bad dramas.
Lucille Ball was the first person to do a filmed (not live) TV sitcom in front of an audience, because she had more energy performing in front of an audience and because she wanted to get real audience laughter. I Love Lucy is the prototype for all live-audience sitcoms. But in the '60s, most sitcoms were single-camera without an audience (except The Dick Van Dyke Show) and they all used laugh tracks.
In the '70s, bored with single-camera, writers and performers started moving toward multi-camera in front of an audience. MASH* and The Love Boat were just about the only big hits of the time that used a laugh track.
In the '90s, most sitcoms were shot in front of an audience, hence the laughter. In the '00s the trend was back to one-camera sitcoms with no audience, but under pressure from writers and critics, the networks stopped using laugh tracks for single-camera shows. This was probably a mistake, because very few single-camera comedies have become hits on a level with the single-camera sitcoms of the '60s and '70s, which had laugh tracks to brand them.
So when you hear laughter on a sitcom, it’s almost always real laughter, which is there because the performers are performing to a live audience. (Even “sweetening” with laugh tracks has become less common. Now it’s more common to use real audience reactions from earlier takes, but there’s a taboo against just using fake laughter.) Canned laughter is dead, at least in prime-time. However, real audience laughter is a different story – those shows continue to be the most popular.
You mean a live ostrich.
Some shows also use(d) “professional laughers”, a hired group of people (either the entire studio audience or a significant chunk of it) selected for their distinctive and engaging style of laughing. IIRC this was pioneered on The Nanny after Fran Drescher was raped (no, not at the studio) and did not feel safe in front of a group of random strangers; the studio vetted a group of people with good laughs to be the show’s audience.
This technique became popular in the 1990s as noted above but when the one-camera no-audience approach took over the laughers were out of work again.
Again, it’s kind of a myth that this is common – it may have been done on The Nanny (though they had a real, and enthusiastic, audience early on) – but most sitcoms are taped in front of a collection of random people who got the free tickets, same as any live audience show.
One of the things that created the legend that “professional laughers” were widespread is that you can often hear the same laugh on every episode of a show, but these laughs usually belong to crew members or writers. Larry David’s laugh can be heard on a lot of Seinfeld episodes and James L. Brooks is constantly whooping it up on the live-audience shows he produced. It may be that these guys are laughing so loud in the hopes that the audience will laugh more, but they’re not “ringers” in any real sense, they’re just enjoying their own work.