While softening my brain watching one of those teevee channels that show retro sitcoms, a question arose:
Why do, or did, (U.S.) sitcoms make such a big deal out of announcing that the program was “filmed before a live studio audience”?
It almost seems like some kind of technical or legal requirement. I can’t think why TV viewers would care one way or the other. I know I don’t.
Back then (in the 1970s and 1980s), it was common to have “canned laughter” added to the soundtracks of comedies which were filmed in studios (i.e., not in front of an audience), and this practice was often derided. If you watch an old show with canned laughter now, and focus on it, it sounds truly bizarre. The “filmed before a studio audience” disclaimer was almost undoubtedly not a legal requirement, but it may well have been the producer’s way to tell the viewer, “the laughter you hear in this is genuine”.
It’s not a technical or legal requirement, but more of a “bragging point” by the network. It’s their way of saying that when you hear laughter, it’s from actual people laughing at the jokes, rather than a canned “laugh track” which many people find obnoxious.
It also means that they didn’t film one scene over and over until it was perfect. You should expect to see little bobbles, especially when the actors have to pause because of a big audience reaction. Small, satisfied smiles, glances and even nods to the audience, etc. Although usually a show would be filmed twice, with the best version of each scene chosen for the final edit, these little artifacts are an expected part of the format.
Agree with the above explanations, but nowadays, the studio laughter is augmented with canned laughter anyway, such as whenever the studio audience fails to laugh appropriately.
Just FYI: Pretty sure** All in the Family** was the first to do this in 1971 (film, actually tape, before a live audience). Think they were also the first (sitcom) to use videotape.
Not really. It was just the first to announce the fact.
Also, there were probably some shows in the 50s that were filmed before a life audience.
I know that I Love Lucy filmed before live audiences as early as 1951.
I believe The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy both were, for example.
Not directly related to the question but pertinent all the same:
When I worked in post-production I decided I wanted to learn a bit about how the sound guys worked and sat in on a few sessions. On one occasion I sat in tracklay - where an operator would use a sound effects library to add in sounds that might have been missing from a lifestyle show. I was impressed when he created the doppler shift on a car engine sample which he needed to add to a vehicle in the background which wasn’t properly recorded. I was less impressed though when he added an arbitrary bird noise to a cut away of a bird in the sky. He said the Producer insisted that when you saw an animal you had to add the animal noise. Good grief.
On another occasion, in the final mix of a programme filmed with a studio audience in a mechanical fighting style show (involving robots, you can probably work out which one I mean), every clash, clatter and bang needed to be added. And the studio audience were so drowned out by the noises recorded on the set, the sound engineer would just add randomly appropriate chants and cheers. It did make the programme better to watch but it certainly didn’t represent the audience’s genuine reaction to the events on the show.
I should add that this was in the UK.
The practice is, as they say over on TVTropes, older than television. Some radio shows (e.g. Jack Benny) were done before a live audience.
My father, who was born and raised in Hollywood during the Golden Age of Radio, was in a lot of those audiences.
I remember watching some news feature about a lady who was paid to sit in studio audiences and laugh appropriately, to lead the others (who were just in off the street). She had different laughs for different occasions, including a sort of “oooh, ho! ho! ho!” for raunchy jokes.
I think AITF was noted for the studio audience contributing to the drama at times, such as the episode where Edith almost got raped; they were laughing along until they realized it was serious and not just screwball hijinks; you suddenly heard some murmurs but mostly stunned silence as the scene unfolded.
Most comedy radio shows were recorded with live audiences by the end. In the earliest days just getting a good sound out of a microphone was enough of a trial that audiences were forbidden. Eventually comics realized that not only did they perform better with an audience laughing at their jokes, but the laughter itself was a selling point.
Television reset everything. All television was live at first. Video didn’t come along until the mid-50s. The only way to record television earlier was to use actual film cameras or to point a film camera at a monitor, which produced a kinescope. In radio days, most major shows were simply done twice, once for the east coast and again three hours later for the west coast. (Large records called transcription disks were used occasionally, but quality was low.) The comparative costs of filming television instead of people standing in street clothes reading into microphones meant that this was impractical, so kinescopes were flown across country (in both directions) and the shows were a week out of sync. The coax cable network didn’t even reach coast to coast until 1951 and many cities were connected later than that.
Lucy refused to move to New York and Desi came up with the idea of using three cameras to film the show ahead of time. Problem solved, though they had to take a $1000/week cut in salary to get the network to do this. There’s almost always a pretty good reason why things aren’t done earlier.
It does seem to be true that All in the Family was the first sitcom to tape on video. If you look at tape from the 60s it’s easy to see why: again, the quality of tapes and cameras were far lower than film. I guess they finally got the main problems solved by 1971, but most television from that era still doesn’t look all that good today.
Hijack.
Just me, or can you CLEARLY hear Desi laughing with the audience in some of the episodes?
Duh, what the hell was I thinkin’!? I think AITF may have been (one of) the first to return to filming in front of one after most sixties shows had switched to single-camera (and canned laughter). Plus it combined it with the stark, jarring realism of videotape.
That distinctive laugh you hear is probably Lucille Ball’s mother, who attended every filming. Several books I’ve read about the show note this.
I once heard someone describe a transcription disc as “Recorded on genuine tar paper” as the sound really was crummy. It didn’t help any that a lot of these things were recorded at 16 RPM, in order to fit a full hour per side. The shellac or vinyl they were stamped on was also low-grade as they were meant to be played once or twice and discarded. IIRC, some of them were also 16" diameter, rather than the typical 12".