You aren’t necessarily wrong. Have you ever seen Friends without a laugh track?
There was a great take on one of these called “Everybody Hates Raymond”
It was the show Everybody Loves Ramon but the laugh track was completely replaced with boos and was frickin hilarious. I think it got removed from YouTube though cuz I haven’t been able to find it for years.
Holy shit, this is much better than the original!!! Damn, I should rewatch the series like this. Where can I find all of it without the laugh track?
Edit: I have to add, the long pauses make it a bit annoying. With the laugh track the pauses aren’t noticeable (to me at least; my girlfriend did notice the long pauses even with the laugh track, and it was annoying to her).
The pauses are there because it’s not a “laugh track”, it’s a live audience. That’s not to say it’s 100% genuine laughter, but they’re pausing so the laughter doesn’t bury the dialogue.
Same reason tiktok and instagram reels are overlaid with that dumb wheezing laugh track.
Wanna know something cool and/or creepy? A lot of the “canned” laugh tracks used in TV (for shows that pretend to be filmed in front of a studio audience, but actually aren’t) are from a small handful of sound libraries that get mixed together. Many of the laughter tracks come from live audiences at I Love Lucy tapings.
If you consider that I Love Lucy was filmed ~70 years ago, and that most of the audience members were likely 20+ years old at the time (the studios were in LA, and the audiences were largely comprised of tourists), then there is a statistically high likelihood that any individual audience member you hear laughing on certain modern TV shows may have been dead for decades.
there is a statistically high likelihood that any individual audience member you hear laughing on certain modern TV shows may have been dead for decades.
Serves them right for being in a canned laughter track!
No but seriously, that’s both haunting and beautiful at the same time. They live on. Like laughing ghosts.
Laughing at us, for wasting our precious time on earth watching Big Bang Theory.
