You can still find funny on television — but there’s definitely less laughter.
A quick survey of the fall television schedule shows that traditional sitcoms featuring so-called laugh tracks, or live audiences sweetened by the canned outbursts, are fading.
Of the 15 half-hour live-action comedies currently on the five major networks, only five contain laugh tracks.
The ratio suggests not only the drastic change in the number of multi-camera sitcoms on air — but also how the comedy genre is slowly vanishing from network television.
Just 10 years ago, the TV season started with 34 live-action comedies on air, archived scheduling shows. Ten years prior to that, there were 55 comedies on television — and all featured an audience’s laughter.
The laugh track was invented by Charley Douglass in the 1950s, but wasn’t widely used until a decade later, when the invention was used to create stronger reactions to shows like “Bewitched,” “The Andy Griffith Show,” and “The Brady Bunch.”
The original box that Douglass invented — called the “laff box” — was found in 2010 and appraised at $10,000 on another TV staple, “Antiques Roadshow.”
Using fabricated laughter gave television producers more options to shoot shows outside the typical three-walled model, and the laugh track became a norm for decades with shows like “Cheers,” “Friends” and “Seinfeld.”
“The Big Bang Theory” is known for its use of a sugar-charged live audience, but since the 90s, shows have been using laugh tracks less.
The reason seems to be different style choices made by producers.
Many current comedies are shot with single-camera scenes with no live audience. Shows like “Sports Night,” “Malcolm in the Middle” and “Scrubs” gained passionate cult audiences that appreciated the format.
Ten of the 15 comedies currently on air, including “Modern Family” — which follows a mockumentary style that allows characters to regularly break down the fourth wall — don’t use any laugh track.
In a review of Fox’s quickly cancelled comedy, “Mulaney,” the entertainment website A.V. Club wrote: “It’s hard to pull off a multi-camera sitcom these days, because rhythms and conventions that audiences once accepted as natural and organic now seem strange and jarring.”
And aside from a cluster of shows like “The Big Bang Theory” and “Mom” — both of which have won multiple Emmy Awards — the old format appears close to death.
