In a sense, TV episodes are just short movies beamed into your living room. But movies never used laugh tracks, not even in the early, silent days, when it would’ve been easy to layer the sounds of a delighted audience over Charlie Chaplin’s buffoonery. There was simply no need: Every movie had its own live audience right there in the theater, so why bother simulating one? Early TV shows were not so much short movies as radio shows acted out onstage. And because radio shows were recorded in front of a live studio audience for people tuning in at home, TV shows were too. The point of the laugh track was to re-create the communal experience you would have in person, Ron Simon, a curator of television and radio at the Paley Center for Media, told me. It was necessary, one production executive thought, “because TV viewers expect an audience to be there.”
Live-audience laughter had long been sweetened for radio and TV broadcasts, but around 1950, Bing Crosby’s radio show took things a step further, dispensing with the live audience altogether and adding in the laughs later. TV executives soon took a lesson out of Crosby’s book. With the creation of the Laff Box, in the early ’50s, canned laughs proliferated to the point that even shows without the slightest pretense of having been performed for a live studio audience used laugh tracks. Even The Flintstones and The Jetsons did. Some shows were still filmed in front of a real audience, but even they sometimes relied on canned laughs.
Not that the viewers warmed up to the laugh track. There remained a dissonance between viewers’ stated and demonstrated preferences: People railed against the laugh track, but they adored shows that used it. Every so often, the networks would try a show without a laugh track, but none of them lasted long. It’s nice to think that we’re above laugh tracks, that we don’t need them to know what’s funny, but “those social cues help you understand the meaning of comedy,” Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist at University College London who has studied laugh tracks, told me.