Let's talk laugh tracks

I get many Friday Questions about laugh tracks, so I thought I would devote an entire post to the subject. Here’s the latest question:

From Homesick Canadian in Taiwan:

Many of your posts are about the importance of getting authentic laughs from the studio audience. If a joke doesn't get laughs, it's cut or re-worked, etc.

However, I don't quite get how this works. It's well known from blooper reels that actors often flub lines and have to re-shoot. How does an audience give an uproarious response to a joke they're hearing for a second, third, or fourth time? My understanding is that this is what laugh-tracks are for. It's also been part of common knowledge in TV culture that producers just add a laugh-track when jokes don't get a response -- for situations like you've written about when an audience is comprised of a busload of Japanese tourists who don't understand English but want to see a taping of a hit American show. Or simply because a joke falls flat and the director thinks the home viewer will be amused if they hear the canned laughter.

The goal is to use as much of the actual audience laughter as possible. Yes, when we re-shoot a scene the response to a joke the second or fourth time is not as strong as the first and if we use that later take we’ll insert the laugh from the first take.

But sometimes it’s weird – the same joke will get a bigger reaction the second time. Maybe they just heard it better, or the actor delivered it better, or the air conditioning was working better,  In any event, we just thank the Gods of comedy and move on.

So yes, there is some jockeying with the laugh track, but the canned laughs are all from our audience not I LOVE LUCY.

Occasionally, you have a really bad audience or one comprised of tourists who can’t speak English, and you do have to fudge a little. But in those cases we try to be very judicious and sprinkle in just enough laughs so that the show doesn’t seem flat but not to where they’re intrusive.   In my mind, once the audience is aware of canned laughter you're in trouble. 

Part of the problem with many multi-cam shows is that the producers crank up the laugh track to where it’s ridiculous. I talked about this before, viewers now feel insulted. “Do these producers think I’m that stupid that I would laugh at this truly unfunny joke just because the familiar laugh track is going crazy?”  They have a right to feel insulted.  Sitcoms have been playing this shell game for sixty years now. 

Here’s an interesting thing – audiences respond way better to things they see live actors do rather than watching finished pre-records. In other words, let’s say I’m directing an episode with a car scene. I will pre-shoot it.

The editor will put it together that night and the following night when we shoot the show in front of 250 people we’ll have the ability to play it back for them and record their laughter.

However, when I direct, instead of showing that finished scene I bring out the actors involved, place them in two chairs, explain to the audience that they’re in a car driving, and have the actors do the scene live. I record the audio and even though the audience has to now imagine the scene, they laugh much louder having real actors performing the scene.

It all goes back to why some shows are filmed in front of an audience in the first place – there’s a real energy the cast derives from a live audience.  They feed off their laughter.  Their performances go up and if the writing is good the whole show rises. It’s intangible but the home viewer can sense it.

Getting back to that car scene, I wonder what would happen if we just aired the scene of the two actors on chairs instead of the real one with them in an actual car.  I don't think the home audience would be thinking about the laugh track at that moment.