The Most Hated Sound on Television

When American viewers flipped open the July 2, 1966, edition of TV Guide, they were treated to a bombshell story. This was the first installment of a two-part series on “the most taboo topic in TV,” the industry’s “best-known and least-talked-about secret,” the “put-on of all time”: the laugh track.

At the time, almost every comedy on air was filmed live in front of a studio audience—or at least pretended to be. Pretty much all of the biggest shows at the time used a laugh track—The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres. Savvy viewers might have figured out that not all of the giggles and guffaws were real, but few people outside the industry understood the extent of the artifice. Even shows filmed live added some artificial laughs, sometimes to supplement the audience and sometimes because the laugh track sounded more authentic than the real thing. Behind the scenes, “Laff Boys” played their “Laff Boxes” like magic instruments, calling forth rounds of applause or squeals of delight with the press of a button.

Viewers scorned the laugh track—prerecorded and live chortles alike—first for its deceptiveness and then for its condescension. They came to see it as artificial, cheesy, even insulting: You think we need YOU to tell us when to laugh? Larry Gelbart said he “always thought it cheapened” M*A*S*H. Larry David reportedly didn’t want it on Seinfeld but lost out to studio execs who did. The actor David Niven once called it “the single greatest affront to public intelligence I know of.” In 1999, Time judged the laugh track to be “one of the hundred worst ideas of the twentieth century.” And yet, it persisted. Until the early 2000s, nearly every TV comedy relied on one. Friends, Two and a Half Men, Everybody Loves Raymond, Drake & Josh—they all had laugh tracks.

Now the laugh track is as close to death as it’s ever been. The Big Bang Theory, the last major laugh-track show, ended in 2019, and nothing has taken its place. Half of the live comedies on the big-four American TV networks still use laugh tracks, but half of those appear to be ending this year. More tellingly: Can you name a single one? The laugh-track haters had to wait more than 50 years, but finally, they can rejoice.

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 weren’t 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.

By the late 1980s, though, the dominance of the laugh track was starting to erode. Dramedies such as Hooperman and The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd got people accustomed to laughing without any cue, Simon told me, and in the early ’90s, shows such as Dream On and The Larry Sanders Show demonstrated the viability of the unsweetened sitcom. In 1998, a not-yet-famous Aaron Sorkin insisted to ABC executives that adding a laugh track would ruin his first-ever TV show, Sports Night. If he were forced to add one, he said, he’d “feel as if I’d put on an Armani tuxedo, tied my tie, snapped on my cufflinks, and the last thing I do before I leave the house is spray Cheez Whiz all over myself.” The show started out with a laugh track but scrapped it for Season Two.

The laugh track remained a force, though, even as the tides turned against it. In 2003, The New York Times wrote that “pretty much nobody likes laugh tracks, perhaps because they’re such obvious fig leafs for the embarrassment of weak punchlines, perhaps because they make us feel bossed and condescended to, perhaps because they dehumanize one of the most human actions imaginable.” At the time, Friends was the most popular comedy on TV.

Within a few years, though, a new breed of sitcoms was supplanting the old, first with the arrival of Arrested Development, then with The Office and 30 Rock, and a few years later with Parks and Recreation and Modern Family. Laugh-track shows were coming to seem not just condescending but also stiff and fusty. People began making homemade videos in which they removed the laugh tracks from classic sitcoms to show that they weren’t actually funny. “Living in L.A., you sometimes hear coyotes eating cats, and to me, that’s the sound of a multi-cam laugh track,” Steve Levitan, one of the creators of Modern Family, said a few years into the show’s run. “I just can’t take it anymore.”

Last month, CBS green-lit a new comedy about two young parents in Texas. It’s a spin-off of The Big Bang Theory and, like the original, will have a laugh track. In short, despite the repeated proclamations of its demise, the laugh track remains. You can still find shows that have it, both on TV and on streaming services, but there is an undead quality to it now. Bob Hearts Abishola, (probably) The Conners, and (probably) Extended Family are ending this year, likely to be replaced by more laugh-track-less shows. And many of those that remain are clear nostalgia plays, such as Netflix’s That ’90s Show, Paramount+’s Frasier revival, and CBS’s The Big Bang Theory spin-off.

Networks and streamers are going to keep swinging, and as long as they do, the laugh track will live on. The older audiences who grew up and spent most of their adult life watching classic laugh-track comedies are still around, and they watch more TV than any other age group. Plus, conventional sitcoms, when they really connect, are more lucrative than any other type of show. But the laugh track simply is not at the center of culture anymore. A laugh-track show hasn’t won the best-comedy Emmy in almost 20 years. If you could once flip through channels and hear laugh track after laugh track, now you can power up your smart TV; toggle among the top shows on Netflix, Hulu, Max, and Amazon Prime; and not hear a single audience reaction.

Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, compares the state of the laugh-track sitcom to that of a much older medium: the fresco. “You could still get people to respond to beautiful paintings like Michelangelo painted on the ceiling,” he told me. “It’s just that people aren’t painting that way anymore.” Tourists still come from across the world to see the Sistine Chapel, and millions of people still watch Seinfeld and Friends on streaming services. But they may never lay eyes on a new fresco—or get into a new laugh-track comedy.

That might seem like reason to rejoice. But the death of the laugh track is not—or at least not just—something to celebrate. For all the ire it incurred, for all the bad jokes it disguised, the laugh track was fundamentally about re-reproducing the experience of being part of an audience, and its decline is also the decline of communal viewership. The era of the family gathering around the living-room TV is over. We don’t all watch the same shows on the same networks, and whatever we watch, we watch on our own personal devices. We don’t go to theaters as often. The laugh track was never more than the illusion of community, but now even the illusion has lost its luster.

There was always something a little dark about the illusion. But there’s arguably something even darker about its loss of appeal. Whether they realized it or not, viewers found comfort in the pretense that they were part of an audience. Now we are content to laugh alone.