If you watched it live, there’s a scene from early pandemic TV that stays with you. Stephen Colbert told a joke in the Ed Sullivan Theater, which was empty, and there was complete silence. The joke was funny. He was very good at timing. But there was something off about it—almost clinical—without anyone in the seats. Like seeing a comedian work out by themselves in a green room. The laughter that was supposed to come never did. Instead, a low-level unease that was hard to describe at the time filled the room.
It took a few months of empty studios and pixelated Zoom guests for the entertainment industry and the public to figure out what the real problem was. Happiness isn’t just a reaction, it turns out. It’s a type of business. And if you take it away completely, even from something as common as TV, the whole social contract of watching something funny starts to feel sketchy.
The laugh track has been seen as an embarrassment for most of its life. That was what David Niven said about it in 1955: “the greatest insult to public intelligence he could name.” Since then, critics have made the same kinds of complaints every ten years. The trick was first used in the late 1940s, when a radio producer quietly switched out a weak audience response for a stronger one from a different recording. Later, CBS engineer Charles Douglass improved the method and made what he called the “laff box.” It was an organ-like machine that stored dozens of different laughs and was so well guarded that only his family is known to have seen it. The whole thing sounds a little silly. It turned out to be very durable as well.
Douglass and the early producers knew that most of the history of entertainment took place in public, but they couldn’t have put it into research terms. In theaters. Places with music. Places to laugh. People laugh in groups, react together, and use sound to find their social place. The laugh track or whatever it was tried to sound like that. Since then, studies have shown what the producers already knew: when people are with other people, they laugh about thirty times more often than when they are by themselves. It’s not the same as having real people around, but a pre-recorded laugh is better than nothing.
There’s a feeling that some viewers are getting tired of streaming comedies, especially the ones that came out in the 2010s and used the lack of laugh tracks as a sign of artistic credibility. Not bad at all. Just the remote. The prestige of being quiet is still important in some circles, but even diehard fans of single-camera comedies sometimes say that watching them is harder than usual. You need to do more on your own. In real time, there is nothing in the room to help you decide what is funny and what isn’t.
It makes sense to ask viewers to do that, and many people actually like it. But it’s important to note what’s lost in that deal. One of the few types of art where how people react is actually part of the experience is humor. Paintings don’t need a lot of people. It doesn’t matter if someone else is reading the same book at the same time. There has always been a need for a room for real comedy, though. Even one that was fake.
This argument may have been over more quietly than anyone has noticed because of the pandemic. Not by making laugh tracks cool again in a clear way, but by getting to the bottom of the argument and showing that people weren’t annoyed by fake laughter as much as they were dependent on it. The studios were empty, so the silence wasn’t nice. It made me feel lost. Being lost is not an exciting feeling that makes you want to watch the next episode.
When you laughed, you were always with other people, even if you were just sitting on the couch by yourself in the dark. As a cynical piece of music, the laugh track knew that before most viewers were ready to admit it. Not that people are choosing it, but that they’re finally seeing why they never really let it go. That might be the strangest thing about its quiet return.
