A reader provides some great professional insight to the thread:
After reading the Dish for a couple of years and subscribing this year, I was pretty excited to see a thread that I had some knowledge of. One of the reasons that I read the blog is the seemingly endless reader expertise on almost any subject. Even though expertise is not something that I would claim, I have worked in this field my entire adult life.
The clip of “The Big Bang Theory” that you embedded to is not a clip with no laugh track added; it is a clip with laughs removed. You can hear the laughter briefly when it overlaps a line of dialogue. The clip is a great example of an actor’s technique of “waiting on the laughs”. They briefly delay their next line so that the audience laughter doesn’t make the next line difficult to hear. Done with skill and expertise, a cast can create a rhythm that enhances the comedic timing of a show. In this clip when they removed the laughs the pauses between the line deliveries destroys the timing and causes the actors and the scene to appear awkward and unfunny.
I have been involved in sit-coms for over 30 years and currently have several friends and a nephew who work on “Big Bang”. This is a funny show that has a live audience which genuinely laughs at the jokes. Even if it is edited to be a bit louder or quieter, or even if the laughs from the first take of a scene are applied to a different take, the laughter is real and drives the actor’s performances.
In the ’90s I worked on the HBO series “Dream On”.
At the time there were no single-camera sit-coms being made other than ours. There were no sit-coms without laugh tracks other than ours. Despite the lack of laughs, we were a critical and audience hit. At some point FOX bought the rights to the network airing of “Dream On” but they were uncomfortable with a sit-com with no laugh track. They added one and it was a total debacle. The actors were not waiting for laughs, the timing was destroyed the jokes made un-funny and the show was quickly cancelled.
In the last few months I have worked a few days on “Anger Management,” which is shot with multiple cameras and made to look like a show before a live audience. There is no audience other than a couple dozen writers and producers who watch the filming and laugh at their own jokes. This option for filming a “live audience” sit-com is problematic because there are no independent judges as to whether or not a joke will make a non-involved audience laugh. The writers have a vested interest in their jokes inciting laughter and even if their laughter is actually recorded it tends to sound forced and fake. Most of the laughs are applied by an editor.
Bolonik reviews two new sit-coms; she doesn’t like one and likes the other. She notices less the laugh track in the one she likes and suggests that all laugh tracks be done away with because she notices more the laugh track in the un-funny show. It seems that she is objecting to the quality of the show not if it has a laugh track added. The actual problem with sit-coms is that comedy is very hard to write. Every week Hollywood employs somewhere around two thousand writers and on any day there aren’t more than maybe a hundred good writers in the entire country. Trying to pin her dislike for a show on the laugh track misses the point. It is just a bad show.
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