Laugh tracks

An excellent article, Alan.

I can't imagine that the single-camera format as forged out of stuff like Malcom and My Name Is Earl will have as durable and productive a career as the standard audience driven sitcom format.

It's hard to defend the laugh-track, as it is a poor substitute for a live ( well-trained) audience.

Yet I would offer this: if live audiences were not an option because of the corporate memo, at least the laughtrack allowed for the continuation of the format. I agree with Matt and Wags that MASH is considerably more interesting without the laughtrack, but there is no denying that the writers were timing the show around one, and when they leave that space for a prolonged guffaw, there is a curious hole in the action. It's like watching a sitcom in a vacuum.

By choosing the laugh track, the creaters chose to write to a "live" audience, nevermind if it was imaginary. Without the track, the show would have evolved into something drastically different.

But to move away from laughtracks….

In general, I tend to want my comedians to be a slave to the audience. It’s both humbling to them and pleasing to me. The sitcom heritage owes more to radio and vaudeville than to film.

As such, its natural instinct is toward quick verbal comedy that often relates to stuff not seen. The theater aspects of the sitcom, as related by Brad Garrett, run deep. Of the many things that make the stage so great are the very limitations that Ted Danson is so anxious to destroy when he talks about showing the “funny thing” that happened off-screen.

That's the equivalent of saying that you do not like your bread and butter. Something tells me it won’t be so funny when its shown to the audience. And for Pete’s sake!

leave something to the audience imagination. They can usually imagine something funnier than anything you can show them.