I don’t know if it’s more painful to watch a sitcom and be told when to laugh, or just not find a joke remotely funny and hear the cues to laugh. This isn’t 1984, and the audience isn’t that fucking stupid. We get the jokes, and your jokes aren’t funny. Learn to write something actually funny and have it said in front of an audience; there’s your laugh track.

I don’t know who first thought of a laugh track. Whoever they were, I hope their corpse has been desecrated…once for each canned laugh. My best guess is some kind of nostalgia from the days of radio and early broadcast where most shows were “taped in front of a live studio audience”. Ok, most shows easily predate that line, but the shows were performed live for people. The jokes were funny and the people laughed, not so much anymore.

Today, the shows aren’t broadcast live, and they’ll film take after take after fucking take. I’m not harping on dramas that need to get the emotions perfect. I’m harping on the comedies that just need to deliver a line and be done. Once the shows started getting recorded on closed sets, the executives wanted the feel of a live audience so they would just reuse the same damn crowd laugh over and over whenever they thought. This has gone too fucking far.

Perusing around the stations, I’ve found one kind of show that still has an audience, and that’s a talk-show. The comedies don’t seem to have audiences anymore, so they just phone the bitch in from a boat. You look at the lesser networks like the sitcoms of Disney, and you see poor writing, even poorer acting, and the same damn laugh track. When is this nonsense going to fucking stop? Please have it before I shit a brick, that’s all I’m asking.

If the show’s live, then the actors must play off the audience for timing purposes, and it’s very noticeable. When it’s recorded, the laughing is cut off abruptly. It’s very easy to figure out what’s going on, and this is why I don’t watch sitcoms anymore. Comedians deliver jokes and can time it perfectly on the first go-round. Actors fuck up take after take and need a helping hand. The executives don’t want their precious actors to look bad in the eyes of the public, so they splice together the best guesses they can muster, slap the laugh track on and call it a masterpiece. This is without an audience to save face for their comedy challenged blunders on camera. I’ve seen dog shit more graceful.

If you want to see the real effect of a laugh track, you need not look any further than M.A.S.H. The show’s creator had a real big problem with laugh tracks and didn’t want them used at all on the show. The executives forced him into it, and he was able to negotiate a deal; no laugh tracks in the operating tent. Where are all the memorable shots from the show? Why the operating tent of course! Why do people remember these shots? Why because they had to think about what was happening of course! The shots were memorable and funny in a bit of a dark way because there was no laugh track. A laugh track would have spoiled the point of the jokes and completely undermine the entire concept of the show. If you ever watch the cuts of the show that were aired outside the states, then you would be privy to one of the best shows sans any sound track. That’s right everybody, M.A.S.H. was broadcast without a laugh track outside of the states, and it’s much better because of it.

So executives, don’t treat your audience like a bunch of idiots. Most are bored and will watch anything on television, but let them enjoy what they see. Don’t try to tell them, “Hey fucker, there was a joke said here. Laugh damn you.” It’s just not polite and ruins your shows. Why do you think reality television took off in the first place? The audience got tired of being force-fed crap they didn’t like. Learn to fucking write and leave the jokes to the audience. Don’t tell us what to do, no matter how big your fucking ego is. It still doesn’t make up for the small dicks you’ve got. And female executives, you don’t have dicks, so strut that stuff and have fun with your trophy girlfriends. Your male coworkers don’t think much of you anyway.