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Laugh Track - TV Tropes

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LaughTrack

Closed-captioning for the humor-impaired.

In the early days of television, comedies were "traditionally" performed essentially as short plays in front of a live Studio Audience, broadcast live or with minimal editing (see Three Cameras). However, as television production grew more sophisticated in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there was at least a partial shift away from live performances to productions that were filmed movie-style, with a single camera and on a closed sound stage or on location. The latter gave the director more freedom in selecting shots and angles, as well as the luxury of multiple takes. However, there was no longer an audience to provide instant feedback on the humor.

The general opinion of the audience held by television executives then (and some would argue now) was very low. There was serious concern that without an audience to "prompt" the home viewer's responses, a comedy would fall flat. The solution was the creation of the Laugh Track (also known as "canned laughter", "tinned laughter" or "fake laughter") — an artificial audience that does nothing but react uproariously to anything and everything.

Naturally, within a few years of its introduction, it was abused and overused. Every punchline, no matter how lame or subtle, would receive the same tsunami of belly laughs from the virtual audience. It became epidemic, even intruding bizarrely into cartoons (The Flintstones and The Jetsons, anyone?). By the 1960s, it had become an annoying intrusion, hated but (in the minds of most producers) mandatory. In the 1970s, however, most sitcoms began to switch away from the single-camera, movie-style format and back to the multi-camera format with a studio audience providing real laughter, which producers found more pleasing because it had a better comic "rhythm" and helped them write better jokes. By the 1980s, the only hit that still regularly used a laugh track was M*A*S*H (which increasingly dispensed with the device toward the end of its run). And while the Turn of the Millennium saw a resurgence of single-camera comedies in the US, these were influenced by the new wave of British comedies of the 1990s, which omitted laugh tracks completely (leading to some Misplaced Nationalism). Some comedies resorted to the use of certain sound effects that served the same purpose, but as the focus of 2010s-era comedies shifted towards either dramatic or outrageous situations, laugh tracks have seen a decrease in use. They are sometimes Played for Horror in the Subverted Sitcom, though.

Although it may not seem so, laugh tracks were surprisingly sophisticated systems at the height of their use. Rather than being just simple recordings of a laughing audience, they were actually carefully generated and mixed, with such discrete components as "the guy who gets the joke early" and "housewife giggles" and "the one who didn't get the joke but is laughing anyway" all precisely blended and reblended to create the illusion of a real audience responding to the show. Up until the late 1970's, these were all the work of one company, owned by Charley Douglass, which used a mysterious machine of his own invention to create those imaginary audiences for hundreds of shows.

A history and analysis of the laugh track can be found on the web here. Cecil Adams' syndicated column The Straight Dope also covered the topic. The Onion is very fond of mocking laugh tracks extensively.

The term "laugh track" is often misapplied to shows that are filmed and later screened to an audience, whose responses are then recorded. This is inappropriate, though, because in these cases the laughter was a genuine response to the humor in the show, and was not pre-recorded... although it's not unheard of for supplemental canned laughter to be inserted afterwards. Sometimes the term is even applied to the existence of a Studio Audience. In fact, studio audience sitcoms tend to get accused of employing "laugh tracks" more than shows that actually do so, because a laugh track tends to be quieter and less noticeable than real live audience laughter. This situation led to many shows, such as Cheers to add a disclaimer either at the beginning or the end of a program: "(Program X) is filmed before a Live Studio Audience".

In some Latin American countries (Argentina, for example), the laugh track is replaced by a crew of off-screen people paid specifically to laugh on command whenever the comedic situation (presumably) merits a laugh; they are known as reidores; a senior laugher signals all the others when to laugh. In Mexico, the Chespirito programs, particularly El Chavo del ocho, had laugh tracks for most of their runs, but in later years this device was dropped, with a disclaimer proclaiming that it was done to respect the audience.

Note that even the shows that record laughter live from an audience (or show pre-recorded material to an audience and record that laughter) will edit, alter, or even add to the laughter in some way, even if (as in most cases) it's just to cover the transition between takes/scenes, using the same techniques used to add true canned laughter.

While some claim the reason for laugh tracks is Viewers Are Morons, in their defense laughing along with everyone else in a group is a very social phenomenon and watching TV can be a very solitary phenomenon. It's not polite to laugh at something that isn't funny, not everyone has a well defined sense of humor (and that doesn't mean they are a moron, either), so the cue can be helpful to some people. One other criticism of laughter tracks is that it creates an enforced No Fourth Wall scenario for every series that features one, continually reminding viewers that that are viewing a performance rather than allowing for immersion into the story and characters (see, for example, M*A*S*H). Another complaint is that if the fan videos that edit out the laugh tracks in sitcoms are anything to go by, the funny moments are only funny because of the laugh track itself, turning it into a comedy crutch.

Laugh tracks and other uses of recorded laughter can have one interesting benefit in terms of pacing a show. Similar to theater, when the audience laughs, the actors will often pause for the joke to "land" and for the audience to calm back down before continuing. This pause is beneficial in some cases because it prevents dialogue or important details from being missed if the audience is still laughing. However, the dialogue sounds very strange without the laugh track, as the actors must deliver a line then pause for about five to ten seconds for the next one. It also changes the type of dialogue one writes; a laugh track forces short, brief, quip-laden dialogue. Without a laugh track, more natural dialogue and more complex jokes can get the space to breathe.

See also Contagious Laughter.

    open/close all folders 

    Comic Books 

• In American Born Chinese, the Chin-Kee story is meant to resemble a TV comedy—the story even uses canned laughter in the form of "hahahaha" written at the bottom of the panel. The canned laughter is played straight for most of the Chin-Kee story, until near the end when Danny fights Chin-Kee, where the laughter becomes overwhelming.

    Films — Live-Action 

• The DVDs of Epic Movie and Date Movie actually come with an optional laugh track.
• This is mentioned in the Andy Kaufman Biopic Man on the Moon, when Andy explains why he is not interested in doing a sitcom: "It's just stupid jokes and canned laughter! And you don't know why it's there, but it's there! And it's dead people laughing, did you know that? Those people are dead!" Interestingly, this rant may have been improvised by Jim Carrey since only the first line appeared in the script.
• In A Face in the Crowd, De Palma demonstrates a machine that can produce different kinds of laughter and applause on cue for the benefit of Lonesome Rhodes, who uses it in the final scene just to practice a speech and pretend he still has an adoring public.

    Literature 

• Laugh tracks are mentioned in Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby:

  "Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead."

    Live-Action TV 

• The first laugh track on television was used in 1950 on NBC's The Hank McCune Show.
• Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch are two good examples of the height of laugh track abuse from the 1960s and early 1970s.
• The Twilight Zone (1959):
  • In "The Dummy", one is used for the scenes in which Jerry Etherson is performing his ventriloquism act.
  • The Poorly Disguised Pilot "Cavender is Coming" featured a laugh track during its original showing and early syndication. The director Christian Nyby was so offended by this that he refused to be in the studio when the laugh track man was present. It was removed from the syndication prints in the mid-1980s.
• The Nutt House: Co-created and written by Mel Brooks; Executive Meddling forced laugh tracks, because the executives felt that Viewers Are Morons. The result was loud, jarring, clumsily dubbed-in laugh tracks that often drowned out the punchlines.
• Get Smart, another series with which Brooks was involved, had some especially bad laugh tracks. (Mind you, some of its jokes weren't much to laugh about anyway.)
• See also I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched and other contemporaneous sitcoms. Although the Latin American dub mercifully removed it from both shows.
• Aaron Sorkin used to engage in knock down, drag out fights with ABC execs over the laugh track in Sports Night. He hated it, they demanded it, and for a brief period at the beginning of the show's run, there was a laugh track. Sorkin eventually won out. This is especially strange given that the show was filmed in front of a live audience for the most part. An unusual hybrid of single-camera and multi-camera production, the entire episode would be performed in front of an audience, but some scenes would be performed with the actors simply reading from their scripts due to the sequences not being filmable with an audience present. Other scenes were reshot later without an audience in order to accommodate reverse camera angles. In lieu of a laugh track, recorded audience laughter from the live performances was utilized.
• The 1980s comedy Sledge Hammer! had its first-season, early-episodes laugh track edited out for the DVD release. The director's commentary explains that the talking heads at the studio forced the laugh track on him because they felt the show was too violent without it. The producer explained on the DVD that he edited it out because the audience doesn't need to be told when to laugh.
• The laughter in the standup scenes on Seinfeld sounds rather jarringly fake compared to the audience response in the rest of the show, presumably because they got a handful of actors in to play the standup patrons. Could also be that it was the "warm-up" to the show, shown before the start.
  • Because the set design precluded a studio audience, "The Parking Garage" was filmed and then shown to a studio audience, then aired and syndicated with their laughter.
• Friends had a tendency to abuse a semi-laugh track. They mostly used a real studio audience but would minimalise or emphasise as they saw fit. Although, they got lazy and used the typical "canned laughter" a fair bit too. Some episodes (such as "The One With Joey's New Brain") can be particularly jarring, where it seems every line gets a laugh - including lines that clearly weren't meant to be jokes.
• The last few episodes of Out of Jimmy's Head, a one-camera Roger Rabbit Effect series on Cartoon Network, had a hastily added-in laugh track in a last ditch effort to make the show appealing. Ironically, the consensus was that it made the show less funny, as the show's absurdist and cartoony sense of humor made canned laughter an awkward fit (they were completely removed from the Italian dub).
• How I Met Your Mother has a laugh track, although very sedated compared to most. Originally it was taped ahead of time and showed edited to a live audience with their laughter recorded, but it has slipped that they switched to canned laughter at some point before season six. The show is actually something of a hybrid in terms of production and presentation, most indoor locations such as the characters apartments utilize a Three Cameras set-up while outdoor locations with a single camera are heavily used.
• Infamously (at least in Canada), the Canadian sketch comedy show The Red Green Show didn't have one... until it was imported to the United States.
• In the 1970s, the British pop music show Top of the Pops used a bizarrely fake-sounding applause track after each performance.
• The Game (2006) used a laugh track frequently in the first three seasons. Seasons 4 & 5, however, became heavy on drama with the comedy being an afterthought, so the laugh track was used sparingly, and often sounded out of place. By the sixth season, the laugh track was completely ditched, and the current revival also lacks one.
• M*A*S*H had one at the network's insistence, but the producers successfully averted it in the OR scenes, and were able to dispense with it entirely for certain later episodes. (The DVD releases of the show provide an option for the viewer to disable the laugh track on the episodes that have it.)
  • Interestingly, one exception to the 'no laugh track in the OR' rule was in the episode "The Novocaine Mutiny", specifically, during Frank's flashback to the incident that caused him to charge Hawkeye with mutiny. It's actually a pretty handy tell that Frank is lying about what happened: note Hawkeye's flashback has no laugh track.
  • When M*A*S*H was originally brodacast on The BBC, it was without the laugh track. The show's producers said at the time that they wished it could have been shown in the US this way. Unfortunately the version now seen on cable/satellite channels in the UK has the laugh track.
• Two Garry Marshall-produced sitcoms (The Odd Couple (1970) and Happy Days) had laugh tracks in their inaugural seasons, before shifting to a live Studio Audience, with the canned laughter occasionally used for "sweetening."
• Every NBC Game Show until the 1990s had a ridiculously loud applause machine. Dennis James nicknamed it "Mother MacKenzie" on an episode of PDQ.
  • The old daytime version of Wheel of Fortune was known for its canned applause. Compared with the combined cheers and applause from the current syndicated version's live audiences, the 1980s version's canned applause was still much louder. There were also awkward "ooh"s every time a prize was shown or the top dollar on the Wheel was hit, "aww"s whenever someone hit Bankrupt or called a wrong letter, et cetera.
  • Super Password got a great deal of canned laughter whenever Bert Convy screwed up (which was often) or extreme applause when the show came back from commercial!
  • Lampshaded on an episode of Blockbusters, where Bill Cullen lapses into Self-Deprecation mode after a particularly bad joke. He says, "can't we do this show with just an applause machine?", and someone off-camera (possibly announcer Bob Hilton) says "We are."
• Match Game used a laughter track in a bizarre way; during the opening of many episodes, while introducing the celebrity panelists, viewers could hear people giggling and laughing, even if there was nothing funny happening other than some TV star smiling at the camera. In reality the actual sound was likely audience applause (as they can be seen doing so when the camera pulls back to show audience members as the opening concludes). There is a possible rationale for this: some episodes of Match Game do not add in this sound, leading to a rather quiet, subdued opening.
• The short-lived CBS game Give-n-Take was produced by and taped at Warner Bros., who used the standard sitcom laugh track of the time mixed in with their live audience reactions.
• The original British version of Da Ali G Show used a laugh track, but its American adaptation (known as Ali G in da USAiii in Britain) lacks it.
• NBC's 100 Questions abused this. It was eventually cancelled after 6 episodes.
• The Singaporean television show Kids Talk Back, like a talkshow version of Kids Say the Darndest Things, was particularly bizarre in this respect. A laugh track had been added to the interviews with children, which made it seem like the audience was brutally taking the mickey out of hapless 4-8 year-olds who were unaware that they were being manipulated into saying things for the sake of good television.
• Both The Muppet Show and Muppets Tonight used laugh tracks. Justified in that both shows were presented as shows being performed for an audience, and it would be entirely impossible to film this show in front of an audience due to the special effects and the puppeteers. This was something of an embarrassment to Jim Henson, who disliked the artificial quality of canned laughter but conceded it had to be used. This is most awkward during musical numbers where nothing particularly funny is happening, but the audience guffaws away for no reason.
  • To The Muppet Shows credit, some of the laughter was actually the off-camera cast and crew cracking up at their co-star's antics, mixed in with the laugh track. Richard Hunt had a particularly loud laugh that can be distinctly heard, for example, in the "Japanese Cake" sketch. Sitting under the table waiting for his cue to bring the cake to life, Richard is audibly in stitches as the Swedish Chef throws candy and sugar all over the set.
  • The Steve Martin episode was originally supposed to dispense with the laugh track and feature only the cast laughing (The Muppets had to cancel the show to audition new acts, but Steve Martin decided to perform anyway). However, the Muppeteer's laughter at some of Steve's antics was so loud it actually had to replaced with a laugh track to avoid drowning out the act itself.
  • The Sandra Bullock episode of Muppets Tonight did a parody of Speed, where a villain set a bomb that would blow up the studio if the laugh frequency dropped too low. Trying to get the laughs back up, Pepe and Seymour do a truly dire joke that has the audience silent and unamused - and over the shot of a non-laughing audience, the laugh track gives a big laugh.
• Early episodes of the NBC sitcom Whitney had a poorly orchestrated laugh track that bore a striking resemblance to the flushing of a toilet.
• The Benny Hill Show actively used laugh tracks.
• Sloppily used in the later seasons of the Hungarian stand-up comedy show Showder Klub. It actually wouldn't be that noticeable if not for every other laugh ending with a jarring, high-pitched "Huh-HOOOH-huh!"
• Not only does the original U.S. version of Hogan's Heroes contain a laugh track (and a rather over modulated one in the earlier seasons), one of the German redubs of the series (known in English as A Cage Full of Heroes) adds its own laugh track, containing a single recording of a couple of women cracking up.
  • Interestingly, CBS used this show as part of an experiment to see if comedies fared better with a laugh track than without. The pilot episode was screened to test audiences in two versions: one with laughter and one without. The first one fared better than the second one, supposedly due to the cerebral nature of the show's humor.
• A hybrid of Laugh Track and Live Audience is the syndicated Judge Judy. The audience is made up almost entirely of paid extras, who can be relied upon to laugh at the correct moments.
• Used extensively for the infamous Canadian sitcom,The Trouble With Tracy, due to the fact its accelerated production schedule (130 episodes were recorded within the space of only about six months) made taping in front of a live audience physically impossible.
• The Indian sitcom Dekh Bhai Dekh often used a laugh track whenever a joke was made by any of the characters.
• A Year at the Top used one, judging by the promo.
• The Brazilian version of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Greg News is recorded in front of a live studio audience, but lost that when the COVID-19 pandemic forced the show to be made from host Gregorio Duvivier's home. Yet an unintentional laugh track emerged at times: while John records alone (lest his young children hear his copious swearing), Gregorio's family is watching him off-camera, and their laughter can be heard in jokes they really like. Gregorio also once mentioned how detractors compared his studio audience laughing to one mentioned in the lead of this article, El Chavo del ocho, making him say that show's laugh track has an "acoustic excellence" of sounding like it was recorded underwater, with some turkeys\peacocks among the audience.
• Most Nickelodeon and Disney Channel Kidcoms (but see Exceptions below) are rife full of this, especially those produced by Dan Schneider and It's a Laugh Productions. Most of them even use the same laugh track.
  • Possibly lampshaded in the "webcast" parts of iCarly (as in, the bits where we're watching the Show Within a Show) with Sam's remote. Usually Once per Episode, she'll hold it up and press a button, which cues the laughter. It's played straight in the show proper, though.
  • Towards the end of Victorious, creator Dan Schneider had begun to insert a laugh track in every line, regardless of there being any joke involved.
  • True Jackson, VP begins each episode with a narration by Keke Palmer telling us that the show was filmed in front of a live studio audience, but if you listen closely, you can still hear the same stock laughs heard in the average Kid Com. Filmed before a studio audience it may be, but laugh tracks still came into play somewhere.
• SCTV had one, since its sketches were recorded on an individual basis and a Studio Audience wasn't feasible. However, the audio engineer in charge of adding in the laugh track didn't have much of a feel for comedy, and would stick the laughs in at almost random spots, regardless of whether they followed punchlines or not, much to the annoyance of the show's cast and writers.
• A laugh track was used on ALF as well. Considering how long and tedious the shoots were, to the point where each 20-minute episode took up to 25 hours to shoot, inviting a studio audience and getting them to stay through all that was impossible.

    Music 

• Many of Ray Stevens' comedy records featured laugh tracks, such as "The Streak" and "Shriners' Convention." He even did whole albums (like Gitarzan) that were made to sound like they'd been recorded live in front of an appreciative audience. This may be the most egregious use of laugh tracks ever.
• Johnny Cash sometimes dubbed applause machines into his songs, most notably "Sunday Morning Coming Down". It's really, really fake-sounding.
• Josh Wink's "Don't Laugh" features a laugh sample synchronized to a 303 bassline.

    Professional Wrestling 

• Most Professional Wrestling promotions that produce TV shows make use, to some degree, of "canned heat", which is not so much a Laugh Track as cheer tracks, boo tracks, and sometimes specific chants ("Goooooooooooooldberg... Gooooooooooooooldberg..."). This is generally played over the stadium's PA system, in an attempt to coax the crowd into a given reaction (or, at the very least, fool the audience at home into thinking the crowd are giving a reaction). And it's also handy for importing into video game adaptations.
• LVD TV one used the first music clip that had crowd noise Von Dutch could find with the note the original audio was lost.

    Radio 

• The first use of a laugh track on radio was on Bing Crosby's show in the late 1940s. The show was the first to be pre-recorded on tape with the help of a German Magnetophon recorder. One night, comedian Bob Burns threw in a few of his folksy farm stories, which got big laughs but couldn't be broadcast due to their extremely racy and off-color nature. The laughter was salvaged and reused a few weeks later on a show which didn't get a lot of laughs, thus inventing the laugh track.

    Video Games 

• Strangely enough, this trope is also invoked by the Ganbare Goemon series, the most well-known example being in Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon. It works due to the general Camp nature of the games.
• Gekioh: Shooting King has an optional mode that replace all of the game audio with a laugh track.
• Scooby-Doo:
  • Scooby-Doo! Night of 100 Frights has one, as a tribute to the original series (see below), even during gameplay. For instance, it usually pops up whenever Scooby accidentally runs into something and bumps his head.
  • Scooby-Doo: Mystery Mayhem is another Scooby-Doo Licensed Game that uses canned laughter.
• Detective Pikachu: While on the set of a Show Within a Show Maximum Music, Tim notices that the show sounds like it has a rowdy audience but there isn't an audience.
• The Nintendo DS version of Cory in the House has a laugh track during cutscenes.

    Web Animation 

• Nothing, Forever uses laugh track that is often placed at random points. It is more consistent in season 2.

    Web Videos 

• Channel 10 - Manila: Played for Horror in "Sign On Sequence + Advertisement and Clock, October 1988". After the Silipbuwan (Moonpeek) segment, the video cuts to distorted shots of what's implied to be a viewer's kitchen accompanied by canned laughter. Moreover, the first show in the channel's "Up Next" screen at the end is titled Ikaw at ang Kusina (You and the Kitchen).
• Steve D'Monster : The series utilized one beginning in Season Five.
  • Steve lampshades it usage in "2012: A Look Back" (S7), when he opens his Monstrocity News broadcast with:

  "This is

  Monstrocity News

  , the only newsprogram where you can hear the sounds of laughter, other than

  The Gary Gnu Show

  ."

  • Subverted in "Steve Vs. Internet Commercialism" (S7), where Steve is constantly interrupted by a series of commercials, which is met with boos and hisses.

    Western Animation 

• Hanna-Barbera is perhaps the biggest offender. Almost all of its animated series have laugh tracks, firing at more or less random times. It doesn't help that by 1971, instead of using the more sophisticated and costly Douglass laugh track services, the company was using a "bootleg" laugh track machine that recycled the same five laughs over and over in a very obvious fashion.
  • The laugh track on The Flintstones was notably edited out in the syndicated airings on Boomerang, and it was also absent from The Man Called Flintstone, which made it a surreal viewing experience for those used to watching the show with canned laughter, but justified since it was a theatrical film.
  • Notably the All in the Family inspired Wait Till Your Father Gets Home aired with a laugh track at first but since has been laughtrackless.
    • It seems to be HB's policy to remove all laugh tracks when remastering its animated series. However, this can only be done if the original dialogue, music and effects tracks can be located, which is not always possible.
    • The early Scooby-Doo series from CBS had laugh tracks added for syndication.
    • The laugh tracks in the first seasons of Scooby Doo, Where Are You! were there from the get-go. Subsequent shows had the laugh track when first broadcast but the laughs were inconspicuously absent when prepared for syndication. On DVD releases, some original episodes feature the laugh track. Others don't.
    • Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated pays homage to the franchise's use of this trope at the end of the final episode.
    • All H-B's prime time animated comedies in the 60s had laugh tracks. Their Saturday morning shows, save for Scooby Doo, Where Are You!, didn't. The only 1970s series that didn't have laugh tracks were those animated in Australia, the odd drama shows (Sealab 2020, Devlin) and their Tom and Jerry 1975 retool. The laugh track was abandoned in 1981.
• The first eight episodes of Rocky and Bullwinkle featured a laugh track, against the wishes of creator Jay Ward; because of the show's rapid-fire, quick-paced humor, the laugh track often played over dialogue, as there was little to no pause allowing for laughter. Jay Ward and co-producer Bill Scott fought with ABC to remove the laugh track, but it wasn't until they were able to get the show's sponsor (General Mills) to back them up, so ABC relented, and the laughs were eliminated after those first eight episodes. The first season DVD set removes the laugh track from those episodes altogether.
• Echoed in a bump on [adult swim], where they explain that most laugh tracks are owned by Desilu Studios, and come from The '50s. They say the dead are laughing at you.
• The theatrical The Pink Panther shorts had laugh tracks added when they were shown on television. This stuck out even more in a program that had almost no dialogue at all. Even "better" is that the original versions of several shorts don't appear to exist anymore, since the full collection released to home video also includes several that still include a laugh track.
  • The All New Pink Panther Show pushed the laugh track to breaking point. For example, the Crazylegs Crane segments would open with canned laughter just because the character was on screen, having not done anything yet. This could be particularly annoying to that section of the audience who were far from convinced that the character was funny at all.
• The Archie Show was the first Saturday-Morning Cartoon to use one.
• Rankin/Bass, following Hanna-Barbera's lead, also created a "bootleg" laugh track using samples from the Douglass library for three of their shows: The Jackson 5ive, The Osmonds and Kid Power. The tracks were initially of poor quality, with loud laughter at every joke, sometimes in mid-sentence, but the sound engineers improved their craft by the time The Osmonds and Kid Power went on the air and were able to at least slightly surpass the Hanna-Barbera laugh track in quality. Eleven years later, their animated Coneheads special utilized this.
• Not exactly straight, but on Sid the Science Kid, Sid can produce one with his microphone, as well as applause.
• Camp Candy: The justification is that John is telling stories to campers and that the laughter is coming from them.

    Real Life 

• Perhaps for such reasons, a Canadian show investigated whether a laugh track makes any difference. They played the sound from dry banter on a cop show for random persons on the street, and got some good laughs. They then added a laugh track and went out on the street again, and people laughed much harder. Statistically speaking, probably insignificant, but interesting nonetheless.

    Anime & Manga 

• Space☆Dandy: Lampshaded by Dandy, who'd been hearing laughter all throughout episode 19. It's revealed the sound was coming from a pair of invisible aliens known as Ambiancians.

    Comedy 

• Parodied in a sketch by Alexei Sayle... on a sketch show featuring canned laughter. He explained the technique to the viewing audience as he walked through a field, and complained about its cheapness. He then headed off accusations of hypocrisy (How could he have real viewers in a field?) by revealing a large audience on portable stadium seating.
• As early as 1959, radio comics Bob & Ray were satirizing the concept by hauling out a 'laugh machine' (because "we don't feel we're getting the correct response from you [listeners],") then making it roar with joy over a deliberately awful sitcom pilot.
• When Mitch Hedberg told a joke that fell flat with the audience on his Strategic Grill Locations CD, he joked that he'd edit in their more uproarious laughter from a previous joke after it.

    Comic Books 

• During the Doom Patrol story with the first appearance of the Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E., Mr. Jones has a laugh track installed in his house to emulate his "normality". It goes off seemingly at random, coinciding with him stabbing his wife and planning a massacre

    Comic Strips 

• In one strip of Calvin and Hobbes Calvin decides that to liven up his life, he's going to make it more like a TV show, complete with soundtrack and laugh track. His mother's reaction mirrors that of most people on hearing a laugh track.

    Fan Works 

    Films — Live-Action 

    Literature 

• Harlan Ellison wrote a story, "Laugh Track", about a woman whose ghost possesses all of the laugh tracks on TV (because her laughter appears on the tape that's copied to make all of them), and instead of laughing complains loudly about the quality of the shows concerned and television in general.
• In Robert Rankin's A Dog Called Demolition, The Shrunken Head pub has a laughter track installed, greeting Danny with gales of laughter, though he can't work out where it's coming from.
• In Widdershins Adventures, this trope is played for horror by the evil fairie Iruoch, who is constantly accompanied by an invisible choir of children who laugh at his every quip.
• The Tines in the Zones of Thought novel The Children of the Sky can only communicate with humans by reproducing the sounds of human voices, since their native tongue is The Unpronounceable. But since they can reproduce virtually any audible frequency (and many inaudible ones), they can speak in multiple voices simultaneously or even, Johanna notes, provide their own laugh track.

    Live-Action TV 

• Monty Python's Flying Circus:
  • While it never actually used a proper laugh track (though it was shot in front of a studio audience), the show features a few sketches in which canned laughter and applause tracks were triggered by one of the characters — including the "Attila the Hun Show" (which parodied American sitcoms) and the "Interesting People" sketch, in which Michael Palin can be seen reaching off camera to turn the applause on and off. In the National Bocialist rally scene, all the applause for Mr. Hilter's speech comes from a gramophone which Ron Vibbentrop is working.
  • Taken a step further in their running gag of using obvious black-and-white stock footage of applauding audiences throughout the series.
• Referenced in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Bread and Circuses", where we see a 20th century TV technician turning the canned applause on and off on a programme. Fine, except it's a 20th century Roman Empire and the programme consists of televised gladatorial fights to the death.
• TV Funhouse (as its own show and on Saturday Night Live) uses parody laugh-tracks, especially for their send-ups of Saturday morning cartoons of the seventies. Their Harlem Globetrotters parody includes the same staccato baritone "Heh-heh-heh-heh" after every line.
• An episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 shows Servo using a laugh track every time Crow utters his newly adopted "Sitcom" catchphrase "You Know You Want Me Baby!" The really old cassette player Servo is using ultimately eats the laugh track.
• A certain single-episode show summed up its content by taking the name Canned Laughter. While the end credits rolled, the same quick laugh track was played over... and over... and over...
• Done during the sitcom segment of the Changing Channels 5th-season episode of Supernatural. That episode was a riff on TV in general...

  Sam: We could die in here.
  [canned Laughter]
  Dean: How is that funny? Vultures!

• A French and Saunders sketch (featuring Dame Helen Mirren and Julia Sawalha) parodying sitcoms had the incessant laugh track constantly interrupting the already terrible punchlines, ruining the timing of the actors by cutting them off when they were speaking, making the whole thing So Unfunny, It's Funny, until they got annoyed and walked off the sketch.
• In an episode of 30 Rock, Tracy Jordan is having a drug induced hallucination which gives him an epiphany moment which gets interrupted by a laugh track, he becomes quite annoyed by them mocking him.
• In the Pierce Brosnan episode of Muppets Tonight, a particularly bad pun from Rizzo provokes no reaction whatsoever, causing Clifford to remark that "Even the laugh track didn't think that was funny."
• Used for the imaginary Show Within a Show Pyro and the Idiot in the Corner Gas episode "Self-Serving."
• The short-lived Comedy Central sitcom Big Lake featured a laugh track, but its presence was for ironic and sarcastic purposes - the stuff that it triggered on were often very uncomfortable or dark situations - essentially mocking the laugh track by using it incorrectly.
• In the early local episodes of You Can't Do That on Television, Christine says the show has no laugh track because it's both the right thing to do and they can't afford (although they added it in when they went to Nickelodeon). Then they show a clip from the local farm report with a laugh track added in.
• The Scrubs episode "My Life In Four Cameras" is a parody of classic sitcoms (as the latest patient is a former Cheers writer) and features a laugh track in several Imagine Spots.
• The CBS editions of The Price Is Right and Match Game had notoriously obvious audience reaction tracks (mainly of "oohs") in their early years. It sounded odd on Match Game simply for an Audience Match answer being revealed.
  • Goodson-Todman's syndicated reboot of Concentration repurposed Price's audience reaction tracks of "oohs" during the Head Start portion of the game (showing four prizes on the board). They tried to make prizes like cat food and candy sound awesome.
• A skit by Brazilian TV show TV Pirata had a "syndicate of canned laughter", which reclaimed for better conditions such as not laughing at bad jokes... while laughter emerged from almost every line, of course.
• Community opened its fourth season with canned laughter and applause - then it turned out this was Abed's mental "happy place" where he pictured himself and his friends in a sitcom.
• House has a dream sequence with House and Wilson raising Cuddy's daughter in a sitcom setting, complete with laugh track.
• The Archer, a villain on the 60's Batman (1966) TV series, used a laugh track in his crimes, his henchmen carrying the device around and turning it on at appropriate moments. He stole it from a "producer of so-called comedies".
• Done as a Cool and Unusual Punishment in the last episode of Danger 5, when Hitler imprisons our heroes in a sitcom starring himself: Hitler's Haus.
• Used in one episode of Mr. Robot, which starts off with a parody of 90s sitcoms, with Elliot's family as the stars on a road trip. It's just as weird as it sounds.
• Milton Berle and Mickey Rooney did what were probably the earliest "canned laughter" jokes (complete with literal laugh can) in 1954 on The Buick-Berle Show. Here is the clip.

  Milton Berle: Hey, this is a boon to writers!
  Mickey Rooney: Boon to writers! It's the biggest thing to comics since writers!

• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia parodies the use of laugh tracks in the episode "Old Lady House: A Situational Comedy", where Dennis puts sound effects over surveillance footage of Charlie and Mac's moms to make a sitcom out of their exploits, with characters noting that the laugh track not only tells them when something is funny, it turns what would otherwise be uncomfortable situations into something funny and palatable.
• A very deliberately fake-sounding one is used in the "Dickie and Dino" segment of The Young Ones episode "Bomb" to mock the bad jokes told by Dino.
• For All Mankind. Three astronauts are stranded on the Jamestown Moonbase with their only entertainment a Betamax tape with a few episodes of The Bob Newhart Show. When the tape gets eaten in the player, they've all long since memorized the whole thing and just act it out themselves, complete with laugh track.
• In Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide, the episode "Class Clown" deals with the gang trying to replace the previous class clown (who has moved out of the school), and Cookie's approach is using a device that adds laugh track to whatever people say, claiming that laugh track makes everything funnier.

    Music 

    Radio 

• One sketch on Dead Ringers suggested adding Barry Cryer's characteristic laughter as a laugh track could make any show sound funny.
• Even today (2021) the BBC tends to record its comedy shows in front of a live studio audience. This can backfire: the cast of I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again have spoken about the unpredictable nature of a hyped up audience. John Cleese recalls there would always be people who laughed at points where no joke was intended, and that at other times the whole audience might miss the actual intended joke, thus throwing the cast out.

    Roleplay 

• Random Assault: Sometimes used for laughs to parody the format of TV sitcoms.

    Video Games 

• The Laugh Track gets weaponized in Dicey Dungeons, where one of the Jester's possible finale cards in Episode 6 is named that, which Curses their enemy into making their next attack have a 50% chance of missing.
• In Kirby Super Star Ultra, an unlockable blooper reel features a laugh track. Being the Kirby series, all of the laughter is unintelligible squeaks.
• The Legend of Kyrandia III: Malcolm's Revenge has what is presumably a parody of this: laughter will often occur after Malcolm's comments, regardless of whether they are intended to be funny. Thankfully, it can be disabled in the options menu.
• In this episode of the Puyo Puyo anime, we are first given a message with tells us to laugh when the icon ^note  Suketoudara is that icon. prompts us to. ^note  Followed by a practice in which the laugh is heard twice. Here are all three icon prompts:

  When Kiki Mora lifts up her broom from the sand.
  When Kiki Mora's broom stops at the water bottle.
  During the chase scene.

• Paying the Undodog 100 coins in Super Mario Maker 2 causes him to tell a bad Mario-themed joke (“Why is the Angry Sun so Angry? Somebody ate all of his desert!”) before playing a laugh-track.
• Parodied in the second chapter of Torin's Passage, where the protagonist visits a typical 1950s sitcom house^note Still monochrome in the otherwise colourful game. And with such signs of its time as Elvis Presley portrait. where every spoken line is followed by one of three very recognizable laugh tracks, to the point of any conversation being very long, tedious and frustrating.
• Versus Umbra: Discussed. At one point, Adrian watches Buddies. When Michael calls it one of the terrible shows with a laugh track, Michael responds that the laugh track is an awesome feature as it tells when the show is supposed to be funny.

    Web Animation 

• LEGO Friends: When appearing on a competitive baking show, the host produces a remote and keeps activating Canned Laughter or Applause sound effects. Lampshaded when a reverse angle of the studio audience area reveals there isn't actually an audience. Cue the Funny Background Event when Stephanie checks under a microwave to find out where the sound is coming from.
• Space Tree: Used in Face Bee the Face Bee in Your Face! Perpetually.
• In the Flash short "Metallica Millionaire", parodying Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, there is a laugh track every time a contestant does something wrong or dumb.
• The Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse episode "A Smidge of Midge" uses a laugh track in attempt to emulate sitcoms from the early 1960s, the time during which Midge dolls began production. Skipper asks a few times if anyone else can hear the disembodied laughter, but no one answers.
• In If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device, Cegorach's appearance in Episode 25 is accompanied by a distorted, unnerving laugh track that comes close to hysterical screaming, and plays over the opening theme.
• The first episode of Brad Jones' show LLOYD had this: Glynis

  : I've got news for you: the date is going poorly.

  
  Lloyd

  : You think if I yelled out "bartender I'll take another" that a laugh track will start playing?

  
  Glynis

  : Why don't you try it and see?

  
  Lloyd

  : Bartender, I'll take another.

  
  The laugh track plays before the bartender mutes a television.
• Red vs. Blue: Family Shatters: In "Phase's Reputation", when Zero walks in, a studio audience cheers from offscreen.
• RWBY Chibi had an episode titled "The One With A Laugh Track".

    Web Comics 

    Web Videos 

• CLW Entertainment: The Doraemon announcement "Just Finished a HUGE Episode of Doraemon!!" features a very repetitive laugh track Played for Laughs. The same soundbite plays whenever anything happens in the video.
• Dayum: A laughing sound effect plays at the “cliff-hanger” pun in “Olympics Sports Portrayed by Minecraft”.
• Jake and Amir: In 'Studio Audience', Amir uses a soundboard to create one. Inexplicably, he also downloads the YMCA and multiple fart noises on the same board, and frequently mixes them up.
• RedLetterMedia: The Plinkett reviews often use it as Sarcasm Mode, such as when Anakin and Padme are having a romantic conversation that's particularly cringeworthy.
• Used in The Nostalgia Chick's review of Grease after Sandy says that she now knows that Danny truly respects her.
• In The Dr. Steel Show, Episode 1, Doctor Steel enters his lab at the beginning of the show to wild applause, which he reacts humbly to... then reaches over and turns a dial which turns off the applause track.
• Brad Jones uses this in his 80's Dan web series, which is a parody of 80s era sitcoms. He lampshades it in his Cannibal Holocaust review as The Cinema Snob.

  The Cinema Snob: Careful with that laugh track; we need it for the next "80s Dan"!

• Pittsburgh Dad, being an homage to classic sitcoms, adds a Laugh Track for stylistic reasons.
• Laugh tracks constantly play through the Board James episode "Full House/Do The Urkel", frustrating Board James to no end. There's the implication that it's all Board James's imagination.
• SiIvaGunner's Muda Kingdom (Beta Mix) - Super Mario Land puts a laugh track and various samples of Dio Brando yelling "MUDA MUDA MUDA MUDA!" over music from Super Mario Land, as a Take That to commenters on the previous Muda Kingdom rip who expected to hear Dio's catchphrase based on the track's title even though it wouldn't be funny.

    Western Animation 

• Most Hanna-Barbera animated series of the late 1950s and into the 1960s have laugh tracks. Justified somewhat with The Flintstones as it was intended to be an animated variant on live-action sitcoms such as The Honeymooners which were recorded in front of audiences at the time.
• In one American Dad episode, there's an announcement that the show is filmed in front of a live studio audience right as Stan and Francine are about to have sex. The audience then makes catcall-esque noises as Francine shows off her sexy outfit.
• In the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode "The Cloning", a possessed television uses inappropriate laugh tracks in its efforts to scare the people watching.
• Batman: The Animated Series:
  • As part of her obsession with regaining her former sitcom fame, Baby Doll carries a laugh track on tape with her everywhere and plays it at moments she thinks are appropriate (along with "Ohhhh..." and "Awww...").
  • From the same series, there's "Christmas with the Joker", where he uses a laugh track in grossly inappropriate fashion while describing his murderous plans. It's possibly a secondary Lampshade Hanging that the "audience" he's using is revealed to be cardboard cutouts.
• Hailey's On It!: In "Full House (of Bugs)". The Denogas stay with the Banks while their house is being fumigated. The result is a Sitcom Homage Episode, punctuated by a Laugh Track from Beta, whose newest update comes with a selection of "standard sitcom noises" that activate automatically.
• The Simpsons played with this a couple times.
  • As in the "Love-Matic Grandpa" portion of the spinoff episode.

    Moe: I'm so desperately lonely.
    [canned laughter]

  • Another episode had a Studio Audience hoot after Marge makes a suggestive comment. Homer immediately says "Bart, I told you not to play the TV so loud!", followed by Bart looking ashamed and the "TV audience" going "Uh-oh!"
  • Another episode had Mr. Burns taking over all the TV stations and putting on his own stupid shows to blackmail Homer. Every single line had canned laughter after it, even though nobody was telling any jokes.
  • The episode "$pringfield", in which Marge develops a gambling addiction. Marge promises Lisa she will give up gambling, saying she will stay home. The two of them hug, with Homer saying, "Aw... just like on TV". Cue to Homer tripping over a chair, with canned laughter.
• Family Guy:
  • "A Hero Sits Next Door" has a gag of Brian making a snarky comment to Peter, followed by canned laughter and applause; the two of them fidget while waiting for it to die down. Brian:

    I don't know what's more questionable, your pitching arm or

    Bill Clinton

    's integrity.

    Peter: Hey, how hard could—

    (loud audience laughter and applause cuts him off)

    Peter: Hey, how hard could it be to pitch?

  • Also used during the opening host segment of the "Viewer Mail" episode. Stewie claims he swiped the can from Dharma & Greg.
  • In PTV, Stewie and Brian make a sitcom called Cheeky Bastard. Stewie claims that the show is "recorded in front of a live audience", but the (fake) laughing is actually provided by him.
  • An earlier episode had a gag involving an actual studio audience having moved in across the street. Peter eventually gets fed up with them and goes to call the cops.
  • In one episode, Brian's heavily edited show is played before a live studio audience. Every time James Woods and another actor says something, the audience laughs at the line and it's the same exact laugh every time, making it sound like the laughter is canned.
  • The "Multiverse" episode parodies the laugh track used in the Flintstones when Stewie and Brian travel to a dimension where everything is made by Hanna-Barbera; nearly everything Rock Peter and Rock Lois says triggers canned laughter.
  • "Two and a Half Men was filmed in front of a live ostrich."
• Robot Chicken had the canned laughter in Blooper's segment. In season 5 however, it turned out that the host was hallucinating it and the laughter changed into distorted (while telling nobody to "STOP MOCKING ME!").
• South Park:
  • In the episode "Jakovasaur", the household of the Jakovasaurs is presented as a typical Dom Com, complete with laugh track. When Cartman comes to visit, he wonders where all the laughter is coming from.
  • The episode "Korn's Groovy Pirate Ghost Mystery" used a laugh track which also prompts a similar reaction from Cartman (because the episode is a parody of Scooby Doo). This episode also features Korn (guest voiced by the actual band), and Kenny in an ED-209 costume. It Makes Sense in Context.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: Billy wishes for the perfect dog, but he doesn't know which of the four dogs he should take home. He then convinces Grim to use the magic of his scythe to combine all four dogs into one single perfect dog named Wiggy Jiggy Jed. The dog (who is a parody on Hanna-Barbera characters like Yogi Bear) in question makes quirky jokes that are immediately met by a disembodied laughing. The cast take note of it right away.

  Mandy: Where is that creepy laughter coming from?

• The Justice Friends segment of Dexter's Laboratory uses laugh tracks in parody of live-action sitcoms (of which it borrows a format).
• One episode of Rocko's Modern Life featured two parasite characters living on Spunky, whose adventures were spoofs of typical '60s sitcoms. The scenes with them have laugh tracks, which the rest of the show lacks. The Show Within a Show; "The Fatheads", also had a laugh track, with the characters mugging for the camera whenever it played. Of special note, however, is that instead of a group of people, the track consisted of a single guy laughing hysterically.
• An episode of Chowder featured some jokes uncharacteristically followed by a laugh track, until Mung finally orders a stop to "the canned laughter." This being "Chowder", it was quite literal.
• Futurama:
  • In one episode, the president of the network which airs "All My Circuits" proves how evil he is by saying, "I once put a laugh track on a sitcom that had no jokes in it!"
  • In "A Bicyclops Built for Two", Katey Sagal's role on Married... with Children is parodied when an alien, Alcazar, has Leela dressed like Peggy and Alcazar sitting on his couch with one hand down his trousers ala Al Bundy, with alien rats and pigs as friends of his who contribute the 'live audience' catcalls and whoops.
  • "Saturday Morning Fun Pit" has a segment spoofing Scooby-Doo, where the characters comment on the mysterious laughter they keep hearing, even when they don't say anything funny.
• Parodied in one episode of Danger Mouse where the title character says "I thought we weren't going to have canned laughter on this show" after knight in armor laughs and runs off after a dragon.
• One episode of The Venture Bros. ran flashbacks of Rusty and Pete's college days with a laugh track added to evoke an '80s sitcom.
• 101 Dalmatians: The Series didn't normally use a laugh track, but included a brief snippet of a laugh track following one of the jokes in "You Slipped a Disk" as well as the second half of the episode, "Chow About That?," apparently as throwaway gags.
• The 1991 show Spacecats had an episode dealing with a native tribe chief who wants canned laughter and applause after everything he says.
• The Powerpuff Girls:
  • The Powerpuff Girls (1998): The episode "The City Of Clipsville" has the girls and the Professor looking back at their past. It ends with the voiceover and superimposed caption "The Powerpuff Girls was recorded in Burbank in front of a live studio audience," with canned laughter and applause over it.
  • The Powerpuff Girls (2016) episode "Somewhere Over The Swingset" had the girls entering an alternate world Townsville where everything is 50's sitcom perfect and every line is met with canned laughter/reactions. The girls even want to know where the laughter is coming from.
• On one episode of Kaeloo, the cast were making their own parody of a sitcom. There was this every time somebody made a joke, no matter how cheesy or lame it was. Later, Stumpy walks in through the door, and a laugh track plays, causing him to get annoyed.
• In The Amazing World of Gumball episode "The Test", Gumball decides to try and break out of his role as the loser, which causes the show to turn into a lame, outdated sitcom centered around Tobias. As well as the show suddenly having poorer video and sound quality, it adds a laugh track that, as Sarah points out, gets louder the worse the joke is.
• Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2017): Hector Evilman's creation in "Inventors Only" with mice enacting Seinfeld plays laugh tracks, with Hector explaining: "and this is something I call Mice TV, the only sustainable future of entertainment! What makes it funny is the laugh track telling you it's funny." This leaks into the real world as the track plays when Flint remarks "I came here expecting to get killed." Followed with a D'awww when he continues with "all you've done is murder my fears...with friendship."
• DuckTales (2017): The episode “Quack Pack!” Is a parody of 90s sitcoms, so naturally, the show takes jabs at the laugh track. Huey even notices it, and is horrified that there are these omnipotent voices that are laughing at them. They actually are trapped in a sitcom set. During another one of the family’s adventures, Donald gets his hands on a magic genie’s lamp and accidentally wishes that he had a normal family, which the genie interpreted to mean a sitcom family.
• In the Miraculous Ladybug episode "Derision", Kim is transformed into Dark Humor, whose powers cause other people to start playing malicious pranks. Every time such a prank is played, a laugh track is triggered. At one point, Ladybug (pretending she was hit by Dark Humor) glues a Lucky-Charm-created toilet bowl to Dark Humor's head, which results in a laugh track even though she's only faking.
• Rock, Paper, Scissors: In "The First Lou Episode", after not giving him exactly fifteen minutes of total time on the news for fame resulting in Lou only having 14 minutes and 48 seconds, he shouts that he's raising the rent with a laugh track accompanying. It then zooms out revealing that the entire episode was on a computer from the titular trio to propose an idea for a new show they have called Rock, Paper Scissors, Lou.

    Films — Live-Action 

• Subverted in David Lynch's Rabbits, in which a surreal sitcom whose only dialogue is out-of-order and nonsensical is still punctuated by a laugh track.

    Live-Action TV 

• Scrubs is a notable exception, all the funnier for a lack of a laugh track in almost every episode (there is one exception in the Imagine Spot episode ("My Life in Four Cameras") which parodies the traditional Sitcom) — the lack of a laugh track allows for innovative use of Sound Effects instead.
• NBC actually advertised its Thursday night comedy block (which Scrubs was a part of) as being completely laugh-track free. NBC's shows have been (since Friends ended at least) completely devoid of laugh-tracks or any similar substitutes.
• Police Squad! had neither a laugh track nor a live studio audience. The DVD Commentary talks about how they fought with the executives about this — however this is inadvertently subverted because the creators hadn't seen the shows for a while, and laughed at the jokes — making their commentary a laugh track in and of itself.
• A couple of sitcoms made by the Disney Channel actually have not used a laugh track — Even Stevens, Lizzie McGuire, Phil of the Future and Jonas.
• The Canadian sitcoms Corner Gas, Little Mosque on the Prairie, Made in Canada and Robson Arms avoid Laugh Tracks. (Except, as noted with the Corner Gas example elsewhere on this page, for comedic effect.)
• The Monkees got rid of their laugh track in the middle of their 2nd (and final) season, and the non-laugh track episodes have such a different feel it almost seems like they're part of a different show.
• The Kenny Everett Video Show on ITV in the late 70s was unique in that there was no studio audience, but the viewer could clearly hear the cameramen, floor manager, writers and other studio crew laughing out loud off screen.
• The League of Gentlemen ditched their laugh track after series 2. (The original Radio series had a live studio audience.)
• The Christmas Special of Drake & Josh finally ditches the laugh track.
  • As did Drake And Josh Go Hollywood.
• The Wizards of Waverly Place movie also ditched the laugh track.
• Red Dwarf, which was considered by a lot of fans to have a laugh track, was in fact filmed in front of a live studio audience throughout most of its eight-series run, at least the bits that weren't on location or technically complicated.
  • The exception is Series VII. It was not recorded in front of an audience at all, due to the fact so much of it was filmed on location and involved complex special effects, but it was screened to an audience in post-production in order to provide a laugh track — it mostly works, but there are a couple of conspicuous points where the actors pause for laughter and there is none. Three episodes from Series VII were available in extended versions without laugh tracks - on a VHS called Xtended (later also on the Series VII DVD) - but this did not get very good responses from fans. As a result, the makers abandoned their idea of not using laugh tracks in Series VIII (by returning to the format of recording episodes in front of a live audience).
  • The Back to Earth mini-series that constituted Series IX, was totally filmed on location (or at the Shepperton soundstage), and has no laughter track.
    • The pre-recording of Red Dwarf sequences played back to the audience on screens didn't begin with series VII, though. Long before then, numerous episodes had had lengthy sequences pre-recorded due to their reliance on location shooting or effects work. For example, the series IV episode "Bodyswap" was entirely pre-recorded, due to the actors having to overdub each other's voices.
    • During "Bodyswap", you can hear the cast of the show on the laugh track. (They were sitting in the audience during the laughter recording.)
  • Craig Charles and Chris Barrie only agreed to return for Series X if it was filmed in front of a studio audience. Unfortunately this took up so much of the budget that all location filming had to be cancelled. This had the knock-on effect of making the scripts for episodes 5 and 6 unusable as they relied heavily on locations they could no longer afford. The replacement script for episode 5, "Dear Dave", was cobbled together so fast they could only film half of it in front of the audience. The rest of the scenes were filmed in post-production and the finished episode aired for fans at a convention to complete the laugh track.
• Married... with Children is one of those cases where people bitch and moan about the "laugh track"... and are ignoring the fact the series was taped in front of a live audience. Live audiences can provide situation-specific reactions that would be difficult to get from a can; in one episode, a tarantula crawls across Al's face while he sleeps, and as the audience's "Eeeew!" dies down, one voice rises above the crowd to ask, "Is it real?"
  • The show's studio audience by the latter half of the run was actually filled with hardcore fans of the show that were excited to be there (versus the "Hey you're visiting Hollywood, come in and watch a TV show being filmed!" that many shows did) and maybe at times were a little...overboisterous (the many moments where its obviously breaking the flow of the characters waiting abnormally long times to speak or continue a conversation because the crowd's going crazy),^note In one of David Garrison's return guest shots, the applause at his entrance goes on for so long that he actually breaks character for a moment, comically looking at his watch. but the crew and actors were always extremely offended at the notion. They didn't NEED sweeteners/canned laughter.
• Another series that averts this is The IT Crowd, also recorded before a live studio audience.
• I Love Lucy was filmed in front of a live studio audience, and is rumored to be the source of a good deal of the canned laughter used in later shows.
  • All other sitcoms which starred Lucille Ball or were produced by her Desilu Studios also used a studio audience instead of a Laugh Track, largely because that's how it was done on I Love Lucy.
  • The pantomime segments from The Red Skeleton Show are also rumored to be a source for canned laughter.
• Cheers is probably the most famous example of a show drawing attention to their live studio audience; a random cast member announcing that fact would be the first thing audiences heard every episode (as opposed to most shows, like All in the Family, which did so over the end credits). Not that they really needed to; watch any given episode and you can hear every last titter, clap or cough from some random audience member. That set must have had some great acoustics...
• Most sketch shows are filmed in front of studio audiences. In shows that have a weird sense of humor or play with format a lot, this is often self-evident, because there'll be a lot of apprehensive tittering if the audience doesn't know where a sketch is going, or one person howling uncontrollably while the rest of the audience is just mildly amused, or occasionally a punchline or an important silence being ruined by premature laughter. Understandably, performers of shows like this can get quite exasperated when they're accused of using canned laughter — why would anyone deliberately add in audience reactions that get in the way of the jokes?
• According to the "liner notes" on the Monty Python's Flying Circus Ultimate Collector's Edition, the Pythons never used a "laugh track". The laughter on their skits all came from the studio audience. If a routine didn't get enough laughs, they didn't "sweeten" the laughs- they just left that routine on the cutting-room floor and didn't air it.
• SCTV did sketch comedy without a live audience. The formative years for the show were shot in Edmonton, Alberta, where television talent was apparently so sparse that the laugh track was done by the guy who did the farm reports, just adding laughter at regular, arbitrary intervals.
• Delta House, a sitcom version of the surprise hit movie Animal House, went beyond canned laughter to canned wolf whistles, canned villain-booing, etc. in a vain attempt to capture the feel of the movie.
• The current trend of mockumentary style sitcoms like The Office (US) and Parks and Recreation has dealt another blow to the laugh track. Obviously, shows like these can't use laugh tracks, since that would destroy the illusion that the shows consist of documentary footage. This type of series doesn't use music (except in the opening credits) for the same reason.
• Some Nick shows have no laugh track, such as Zoey 101, Big Time Rush and The Troop, which are somewhat unusual for the channel but are all justified by not being typical Three Cameras Kid Com shows and being shot extensively on location. It also helps than Zoey 101 is a dramedy and The Troop is an action/adventure show. Subverted at least with Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide in which the laugh track was replaced with a set of specific "stand-in" sounds^note  (the show was filmed mostly on-location, and by the time it premiered, laugh tracks were on their way out), having one for a determinate situation.
• Same goes for some Disney Channel Shows, such as the channel's earliest shows, the show Lizzie McGuire and Jonas L.A. which was shot on location in (you guessed it!) L.A. Jonas L.A. also was Disney Channel's first show with a continuing story in each episode. It too was a drama, so no need for laugh track.
• In a surprising example, the Canadian Kid Com Wingin' It avoids using a laugh track.
• The Big Bang Theory is one of the few shows that proudly uses a Studio Audience. As the show became more popular most of the audience consists of die-hard fans, thus the laughter tended to be a bit more aware of the nuances of the show and were anticipating the punchlines (ie Sheldon starts an innocuous sounding dialogue about Windows 7 and there are some snickers at "It is much more user friendly" before the actual joke of "I don't like it"). This resulted in many people assuming the show did, in fact, use a laugh track. One Chuck Lorre Vanity Plate at the end of an episode featured a composite picture of the studio audience with the caption "This is our 'laugh machine'"
  • Additionally, as common in similar shows there are some locations where a studio audience would not be able to attend such as an actual park or street corner. The show also has a sequence where the characters climb the stairs to Sheldon and Leonard's apartment, which are filmed in piecemeal fashion because each floor is a redress of the same set, making it difficult for the studio audience to laugh at a punchline set up on a previous floor.
• Malcolm in the Middle doesn't use a laugh track either.
  • Malcolm in the Middle's ultimate legacy is that, along with the British sitcom Spaced, it's considered to be the Trope Codifier of the single camera, laugh track-free sitcom. Since Malcolm premiered, it's become popular for high-quality, single-camera sitcoms like Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office (US), 30 Rock, Community, Peep Show, The Inbetweeners, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Arrested Development and Flight of the Conchords (among others) to eschew laugh tracks entirely. Coincidentally (or rather not) these shows are usually some of the most acclaimed comedies on television, with laugh-addled comedies seen as lowbrow. Naturally, some (specially people related with the laugh track) have often complained that the stuffiness of modern comedies (specially regarding the British-influenced "Mockumentary" format) has made them devoid of any climax, even if their criticism is dissed as Misplaced Nationalism).
• Oddly enough, The Mighty Boosh was supposed to have a laugh track in its early stage of production, as we can see with the pilot episode (it's included in the DVDs). They actually showed the episode in front of an audience and recorded their laughter. Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding found the audience overdid it so much that they decided not to keep it. It sounds disastrous indeed, as The Boosh is clearly not a "laugh out loud" type of comedy.
• All in the Family was recorded in front of a live studio audience, as announced at the end of nearly each episode. In the later seasons they stopped using live audiences, presumably because they were distractions to the actors; they played back each episode to the audience instead.
  • However later seasons, as well as the After Show Archie Bunker's Place, used a laughtrack reportedly at Carol O'Connor's insistance.
    • Most of the sitcoms in the All in the Family Universe such as Maude, Good Times, and The Jeffersons were also taped in front of a live audience.
• Latin American hits, El Chavo del ocho / El Chapulín Colorado. It is a long story. These shows were originally filmed in front of a Studio Audience and then got increasingly abusive of the laugh tracks late in their run, but the later sketch show Chespirito from the same author that often included El Chavo Del Ocho and El Chapulin Colorado did not have a laugh track and it was explicitly mentioned that it was for respect of the audience. However, it is worth noticing that it actually used certain music tracks that played after each joke.
• The Seinfeldian German sitcom Pastewka doesn't use a laugh track. German critics agreed that this vastly improves the deadpan quality of the show.
• Home Improvement not only used a live studio audience's laughter, but they also got their extras from audience volunteers. For "Tool Time" the studio audience was the actual studio audience, and you can see how people are laughing at the gags on the show as though they were at a sitcom taping.
• The Daily Show and likewise its sister show The Colbert Report are filmed in front of a live audience. Both hosts interact with it fairly often, usually by telling them an off color joke was still funny, or criticizing their choice to laugh at a gag.
  • Even more annoying than the audience laughing at a bad joke: the audience bursting in laughter too soon, obviously mistaking a mere set-up line for the punch-line. It's the exact opposite of Late to the Punchline, but it still confirms that Viewers Are Morons.
• Titus used a live studio audience, but with a twist in style. Every episode had a main story taking place primarily in one location and in approximate Real Time, and this was performed as a play. A Framing Device called the neutral space (a black and white room where Titus talked directly to the camera) divided up the action with a Flashback, Imagine Spot or other type of gag to put the main story in perspective. The cast would record the various Neutral Space-related bits on Wednesday, but also rehearse the main story all week for the Friday taping. At the taping they would perform the main story live for the Studio Audience, but would also show the audience video of the Neutral Space material in the appropriate place in the overall episode, capturing the laughter as a complete episode rather than in piecemeal.
• Bill Cosby's first sitcom, the 1969-71 series The Bill Cosby Show, aired without a laugh track at Cosby's insistence (and over the objections of NBC executives).
  • Later The Cosby Show was taped in front of a live audience.
• Saved by the Bell had a live studio audience - and, like the audiences from Married... with Children and The Big Bang Theory, it was very in-your-face and obnoxious. However, predecessor series Good Morning Miss Bliss used a conventional laugh track; and since the two shows are part of the same syndication package, it makes for a good education as to the differences between the two.
• Steven Moffat's sitcom Chalk provides a case-study in one of the dangers of using a studio audience. The audience for the first series found the show hilarious, to the extent that a second series was commissioned before the first had even aired, and the BBC compared it to Fawlty Towers in the publicity material. The problem was that the show's loudness, while excellent theatre, did not translate at all well to television and the first series flopped while the second was being made. The second was aired, but in increasingly lesser graveyard slots.
• Taskmaster: Series 1-9 were filmed in front of a clearly visible studio audience. When this was impossible in series 10-12 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the producers scorned to use a laugh track, and instead screened each recorded episode to a smaller audience in post-production, recording their genuine laughter and using that. They returned to using a live audience from the 2022 New Year Treat (produced and aired after Series 12 and before Series 13) onward.
• The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air used a studio audience. "Will's Misery" ends with a gag where Carlton freaks out and runs screaming across the set and out into the audience.
• Unusually for a Britcom from The '70s, The Trouble With You Lilian was aired with no laughter — audience or canned — of any kind.

    Puppet Shows 

• Dinosaurs initially had this, but the makers didn't want it and it was subsequently dropped. Combined with The Simpsons never using one except to subvert it, TV Guide praised both shows back in the day (the early 1990s) for this avoidance.

    Western Animation 

• Glenn Martin, DDS, a stop-motion show, had a laugh track for about 8 episodes until it was removed entirely because the creators claim "it gave the show too much internal thinking".
• The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack used this in the episode "Please Retire" and "Under the Sea Monster". Word of God states that this (along with a episode-long "drawn in front of a live audience" gag) is done whenever the crew thinks an episode could have been better, but they didn't have enough time to fix any problems with it.
• A Charlie Brown Christmas was supposed to air with a laugh track, a common element of children's cartoons at the time. Charles Schulz objected, maintaining that the audience doesn't need to be cued to laugh. The special was so successful that it completely exterminated the use of a laugh track in animated comedy, nowadays a laugh track is almost never used in Western animation except to make fun of its existence.
• The 1988 Mighty Mouse episode "Bat With A Golden Tongue" had Mighty Mouse attempting to help Bat-Bat kick his joke-telling addiction. Bat-Bat's last word to the audience was "Just say no to canned laughter" (which was replaced with a guy screaming at McDonald's insistence) followed by a pan shot to a busted ceiling (caused from an earlier scene) and canned laughter and applause.
• Averted in The Alvin Show. Ross Bagdasarian insisted that the show skip the addition of a laugh track, against the wishes of the network. Though there was the sound of clapping that sounded like it came from a recording in "Wild, Irish Rose."

    Western Animation 

• In Hazbin Hotel, Alastor, the Radio Demon, speaks like a 1920s or 1930s radio personality (because he once was one), complete with a constant Radio Voice, even though he's personally present. This is accompanied by didactic period music and a subtle laugh track that sometimes appears when he laughs (though noticeably, not when he laughs as part of a threat). This is used for sinister effect, as a reflection of his demonic powers.

Xemnas's claim that only Roxas can wield the Keyblade invokes background laughter due to it already known to not be true, and both of them react to it.

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