Artificially Sweetened: The Story of Canned Laughter
The following article is from the bookUncle John’s Bathroom Reader Tunes Into TV.
What if the studio audience isn’t laughing at what’s supposed to be funny? What if there isn’t a studio audience at all? There’s always “sweetening” -tweaking a program’s audio wth a laugh track or some other canned response. This is the story [...]
A Brief History of Canned Laughter
Before television came along, comedy was largely a social thing. If you were seeing comedy live on stage or in a movie, you were likely seeing it with other people. And you had to listen to them all laugh. The guy two rows behind you with the forced belly laugh he uses for jokes he [...]
