The laugh track is also used to fill in the pause the
actors had to take due to the audience reaction. Just like with comedy shows people in groups laugh more than when you are watching at home.
This has always bugged me. In any bygone, popular TV show when an actor first shows up there’s a roar of applause, claps, stomps, whistling and shouting for 10 seconds where they just stand, kind of awkwardly waiting for noise to stop in order to say their line. I mean it’s ok for a live crowd, but cut that shit off my TV show for fuck’s sake.
Gotta fill up that 20 minute runtime somehow! Add catch phrases and innuendo (for the obligatory oooh from the laugh track machine) and you have half an episode, right there
It’s a throwback to pre-TV stage shows. The types of people funding TV shows are old and set in their ways and back then they’d make their shows just like The Honeymooners or I Love Lucy.
The ‘audience reaction’ existed because the show needed a laugh track from the audience. Justifying one by the other is circular reasoning at its finest.
The laugh track is also used to fill in the pause the actors had to take due to the audience reaction. Just like with comedy shows people in groups laugh more than when you are watching at home.
This has always bugged me. In any bygone, popular TV show when an actor first shows up there’s a roar of applause, claps, stomps, whistling and shouting for 10 seconds where they just stand, kind of awkwardly waiting for noise to stop in order to say their line. I mean it’s ok for a live crowd, but cut that shit off my TV show for fuck’s sake.
Gotta fill up that 20 minute runtime somehow! Add catch phrases and innuendo (for the obligatory oooh from the laugh track machine) and you have half an episode, right there
It’s a throwback to pre-TV stage shows. The types of people funding TV shows are old and set in their ways and back then they’d make their shows just like The Honeymooners or I Love Lucy.
The ‘audience reaction’ existed because the show needed a laugh track from the audience. Justifying one by the other is circular reasoning at its finest.