Z500

do shows in other countries have laugh tracks? why bother with them anyway? i realized the other day i don't even notice them anymore. besides, cartoons (futurama, family guy and the like) don't have them, they just sound so out of place

vixstile

Especially when they're used in an outdoors scene. It's like...You know they theres no audience there!

echidna

Can't stand laugh tracks, I think that's a large part of the Simpsons appeal.

Bible Humper

The canned laugher serves as Social Proof.

This is taken out of Persuasion: The Psychology Of Influence by Dr Cialdini.....

....Why, then, is canned laughter so popular with television executives? They have won their exalted positions and splendid salaries by knowing how to give the public what it wants. Yet they religiously employ laugh tracks that the audiences find distasteful. And they do so over the objections of many of their most talented artists.....

......What could it be about canned laughter that is so attractive to television executives? Why would these shrewd and tested businessmen champion a practice that their potential watchers find disagreeable and their most creative talents find personally insulting? The answer is at once simple and intriguing: They know what the research says. Experiments have found that the use of canned merriment causes an audience to laugh longer and more often when humourous material is presented and to rate the material as funnier. In addition, some evidence indicates that canned laughter is most effective for poor jokes.

*The general evidence regarding the effect of canned laughter on responses to humor come from studies such as Smyth and Fuller(1972), Fuller and Sheehy-Skeffinton(1974), and Nosanchuk and Lightstone(1974), the last of which contains the indication that is most effective for poor material.

Is it any surprise, then, that television, glutted as it is with artless situation-comedy attempts, should be saturated with canned laughter?

To discover why canned laughter is so effective, we need to understand the nature of yet another potent weapon of influence, the principle of social proof. It states that one means we use to determine what is correct is to find out what other people think is correct. The principle applies especially to the way we decide what constitutes correct behavior. We view a behavior as more correct in a situation to a degree that we see others performing it.....

.....In the case of canned laughter, the problem comes when we begin responding to social proof in such mindless and reflexive fashion that we can be fooled by partial or fake evidence. Our folly is not that we use others' laughter to help decide what is humorous, that is in keeping with the well-founded principle of social proof. The folly is that we respond to obviously fraudulent laughter. Somehow, one disembodied feature of humour- a sound - works like the essence of humor.....

....The television executives are exploiting our preference for shortcuts, our tendency to react automatically on the basis of partial evidence. They know that their tapes will cue our tapes.

Click, whirr.

echidna

Interesting that it's tolerated in sitcoms but not in movies.

Darwin26

i'm thinkin what would Jesis think of canned laughter... probably another gray area ...

kwigibo

There's also the advantage in sitcoms of being able to write up to a third less material.

Rhaedas

Group mentality rears its ugly head again. I wonder, do only certain types of people/personalities notice the laughtracks as irritating?

dangin

My almost 4-year-old relentlessly watches a "best of Scooby Doo" tape that her mother acquired for her. (curse that women ) It has canned laughter throughout and it is hideous. Even when I am in another room the canned laughter grates on me.

Normus

what i find annoying is the dumber the show and or jokes, the more likly it is to appear. Also makes me wonder if people would find most sit coms entertaining without help knowing whats suposed to be funny.