• by Gary Holmes , Op-Ed Contributor, May 29, 2018

Television may be the most democratic art form in world history, but it still has its snobs. And one of the biggest signs of a TV elitist is that he or she can’t stand the laugh track.

I have to admit I'm among those who hate to hear laughter on TV unless it’s clear that the audience is part of the show, as with “Saturday Night Live” or the Netflix and HBO stand-up specials.

I don’t like to find myself in the company of snobs, but I find canned laughter distracting and intrusive. I realized that when the background ha-has drove me away from the rebooted “One Day At a Time.”

The laugh track is on my mind because of a recent podcast by Slate’s TV critic Willa Paskin on its history and purpose.  On the podcast, called “Decoder Ring,” Paskin argues that the laugh track served as a form of “training wheels” to help people transition from a world in which they experienced entertainment collectively outside the home — at the movies or theater performances — to one in which they were watching in small groups or alone in their own living rooms.

It’s Paskin’s thesis that the laugh track helped audiences acclimate themselves to the central weirdness of having video images coming into their homes.  When TV moved to Hollywood and developed recorded single-camera shows, the only way to replicate the experience of shared laughter was through the Laff Box, a device that mixed up to 300 different recorded laughs to make it seem as if an audience was laughing along with the viewer.

From the early 1950s until the early 2000s, the laugh track reigned supreme on sitcoms.  Along the way there had been a number of innovative laugh-track-free sitcoms on Fox, such as “Malcolm in the Middle” and the “Bernie Mac Show” but it wasn’t until the massive popularity of “The Office” in 2005 that the laugh track really began to feel retrograde.

Paskin’s history of the laugh track is fascinating, but I’m not I sure I agree that it helped audiences get used watching in-house entertainment. How else then to explain the quick acceptance of television drama, which had no equivalent of simulated audience response?  In fact, it would be profoundly disturbing if there was a “gasp track” or “weep track” to mimic the response of audiences during scary or sad dramatic moments.

The laugh track was almost certainly designed to help audiences transition from a legacy medium: radio.  In the early 1950s, audiences were already familiar with the concept of sitting at home, alone or with family, and laughing to comedy that came out of a box in their living rooms.  Indeed, many of the first sitcoms were video versions of popular radio comedies such as “The Jack Benny Show” and “The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show.”

Paskin’s other theory on the popularity of the laugh track is that it contributes to the illusion that we are engaged in a shared experience while watching TV, even when we’re by ourselves, which is increasingly the case. This seems slightly more defensible, but only if you accept the premise that the effect is subliminal and not consciously received.

Rather, I think the laugh track survived so many years because it reassured insecure audiences that what they were watching was actually funny.  I think of a show like “Seinfeld,” which took misanthropic humor on TV to a new level.  The laugh track signaled to viewers that yes, it really is funny when Jerry gets caught making out at “Schindler’s List.”  I’m convinced that without the laugh track, even with the same jokes, it would have been a deeper, darker, more absurdist show — but not as popular.

To be honest, it’s been my experience that while many people think they are funny, they’re actually not.  Able to act silly after a couple of drinks, yes.  Able to point out the absurd realities underneath everyday life, no.  I can’t blame them, then, for preferring shows that give them a gentle nudge about what’s theoretically funny.  (And “theoretically” is the key word here — because if you listen to shows like “Friends” without their laugh tracks, it’s clear that the jokes are not really that funny.)

It can’t have escaped the networks’ notice that the most popular sitcoms on ABC (“Roseanne”), CBS (“The Big Bang Theory”) and NBC (“Will and Grace”) all have laugh tracks, or rather, they were “filmed in front of a live studio audience.”  None of these shows want anyone to think they use an actual laugh track, although I find it hard to believe that live human beings actually laugh at some of the jokes on these shows.

The last sitcom with a laugh track to win an Emmy was “Everyone Loves Raymond.” Since then, critical praise has been for edgier one-camera shows without laugh tracks.  And yet audiences seem to like laugh-tracked shows.  They’re not really my thing, but the TV universe seems big enough to accommodate a variety of sitcoms, regardless of who’s pushing the laugh buttons.