this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
90 points (100.0% liked)
Casual Conversation
3439 readers
226 users here now
Share a story, ask a question, or start a conversation about (almost) anything you desire. Maybe you'll make some friends in the process.
RULES
- Be respectful: no harassment, hate speech, bigotry, and/or trolling.
- Encourage conversation in your OP. This means including heavily implicative subject matter when you can and also engaging in your thread when possible.
- Avoid controversial topics (e.g. politics or societal debates).
- Stay calm: Don’t post angry or to vent or complain. We are a place where everyone can forget about their everyday or not so everyday worries for a moment. Venting, complaining, or posting from a place of anger or resentment doesn't fit the atmosphere we try to foster at all. Feel free to post those on [email protected]
- Keep it clean and SFW
- No solicitation such as ads, promotional content, spam, surveys etc.
Casual conversation communities:
Related discussion-focused communities
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The laugh track.
It ruins so. Many. Shows.
I mean .. maybe I'm wrong here. But if you wrote actual funny things, I'd laugh. Idk. I'm probably wrong.
Oddly, though, you can't just cut it out from shows that have it, especially if they actually film in front of a live audience, though even those with canned laughter are playing in the same sandbox. The pacing and the vibe gets completely thrown off because the writers and actors have to account for the laughs, and it becomes eerie without them. It's a different style of making TV that's seeking a different type of reaction from the TV audience, and has different limitations. Understanding that can let you enjoy the best examples of the form (admittedly almost all 20 years old or more). Stock characters slinging zingers and potentially doing pratfalls can be amusing (though the form has a direct lineage to radio shows so it tends to be light but verbal -- the physicality is a huge part of what made I Love Lucy groundbreaking), but it doesn't shine when trying to do cringe, nuance, dramedy, or densely packed humor.
This is not to say that you should watch The Big Bang Theory. You should not. It's awful. The easy tropes and low cost of production (other than stars' salaries if a show takes off) means that so much garbage has been done in this format, I daresay higher than single-camera "movie style" shows. It's just that it's not quite so simple as "write more funnier."
IMO, it's almost like telling a musical theater writing team that their play would be better if the characters weren't constantly breaking into song. For the record, my instincts and tastes leave me sympathetic to that last point, so I just don't watch many musicals, live or recorded. It's not that they're bad; the appeal is just lost on me. Same with multi-cam sitcoms with laugh-tracks.
MASH is one of the best TV shows ever made and that has a laugh track through most of it, although I've heard it aired in Europe without it and was mostly better for it, but that is the show that first started challenging the need for a laugh track in the first place and successfully ditched it when they went harder into dramedy.
Laugh tracks are needed... It just bothers me.
I once saw a video of the wonder years with out the voice over.
It's not great. So the added voice / laughter has value. I just don't enjoy it.
Without it most of them are just condescending and misogynist. It's always sunny in Philadelphia has no laugh track and is just great.