I've been thinking about this for a long time and, yes, I do think about stupid, pointless things as well as deep, metaphysical ones. Yes, the former trump the latter.
A long, long time ago, when Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz and Jackie Gleason and John Forsythe and Bob Cummings showed up live on our 12" TV screens, the shows were live, there was an audience in the studio and when someone said something funny (or forgot their lines), the audience laughed. In our living rooms in front of those little screens, we laughed along with them, and the actors vamped and waited politely until they could be heard.
That's the model we grew up on, the same as in Shakespeare's day (and he had some whoppers in a few of those plays) sans TV sets, and the same as today in live performances like comedy clubs and Broadway musicals. They make funny, we laugh, and the timing is reset for the next line.
The only place that there is dead silence after a joke is in the movies, where there is no live audience and everyone in the movie studio is sworn to dead silence. It has always been, at least to me, one of the distractors in film (the element that stops suspending my disbelief) that something funny happens and no one laughs.
It used to be the only place. Some time in the recent past, some TV comedy, and I can't recall which, decided to omit the laugh track. While other sitcoms proudly had one of their actors do a voice-over that "[Name of Hilarious Sitcom] is [filmed/videotaped/recorded] before a live audience" and raucous laughter accompanied the jokes, this one blazed a trail of silence, as if we were sitting in an empty theater. Perhaps it was M*A*S*H; I know they took out the laughter in the OR scenes.
I plainly recall my first thought, which was "something's not right here", followed by "they turned off the laugh track", followed by "what were they thinking." After a while, I started thinking something less pleasant, that is, that there is a whole lot of pretentious crap going on, if a stinking TV comedy is trying to get us to believe we're in a movie theater.
That was really what bothered me, the apparent smug self-importance of the people making decisions to believe that a TV comedy was too important to have laughter heard -- and no one is more smugly self-important than Alan Alda, the show's "creative consultant" and one of its lead actors.
At any rate, now we have a bunch of TV sitcoms without laughing, from Modern Family to well, this one and that one; I've gotten so used to being unsurprised at the device that I forget which ones do and which don't. I do know that I'm a lot more comfortable laughing with "friends" and sharing the humor not only with my lovely missus, but with the chuckles of the other unseen chucklers on TV confirming our taste in humor.
I hate that kind of pretense; I just know that the laugh tracks were pulled from those shows because some artiste thought the laughter to be beneath them (who knows, maybe it was theater girl all grown up who made it to TV).
I'll bet I have friends who just detest laugh tracks and wish they'd all go away, and they're just as entitled to their opinions as I am. But I wrote it first, neener neener neener.
Make 'em laugh.
Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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