When was the last time you thought of a sitcom laugh? It's probably a few years. Maybe decades? For a long time, the sitcom with background laughs seemed almost dead, absolutely firmly dead. And, like the villagers hit by the plague Monty Python and the Holy Grailthe , kept sitting up, as if to say happily, with a Cockney accent: "I'm not dead yet!"

People might look at laughing sitcoms, like an observer anthropologist: It's an hour and a half show with canned laughs of natural broadcast habits that have been forced to extinction since the 1990s by an invasive species (single camera comedy). Back in 2021, several media announced that the format had officially passed away, when there was no new multi-camera sitcom in the fall and two highly acclaimed postmodernist shows (Disney+'s'S Wandavision and AMC Kevin can-K himself) Surgery to remove this type.

However((Wear mipo glasses): If I were to tell you that there are more multi-camera comedy with background laughs currently compared to a single cam (seven to five), and many cameras are doing well? After all, critics beat and evolving audience tastes, there is still a new Chuck Lorre sitcom this season (Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage) Top 5 in the broadcast Nielsen? While most new streaming comedies are single cams, they are often beaten by decades-old replays Friends and Big Bang Theory?

For years, a sitcom that has long been cheesy, commercially non-artistic, background laughter, has been denounced as a dystopian form of psychological control of jokes. One study shows that laughter makes it more likely that the audience will find jokes interesting and trigger the mirror’s reactions – different from the way you see someone yawning makes you want to yawn (will apologize if you yawn now; this was never a target for the writer). Laughing is also known as the mechanism of systemic misogyny, with someone (presumably anonymous middle-aged white) slapping laughter on the crackdown of the sitcom dad patriarch (“On the Moon Alice!” Ralph threatens Alice Honeymoonerraise your fist and prompt for pre-recorded hot).

However, television has developed so much in recent years that there is an argument for re-appreciating the format in our current era of peak realism. FX's "Comedy" Bear The Emmys record breaks and is so real that every character is painful (like working in an actual restaurant). The most popular genre show at the moment is HBO's show Our last oneit adopts a muddy idea - Zombie Apocalypse - to create such a real world where a cute character dies painfully almost every week. When HBO's breakthrough medical drama, Pittso real about life that you teach all the questions you never thought about hospital staff. Even Disney Star Wars show, Ando, It is taking its Star Wars so seriously that in a recent episode, an Imperial officer attempted to rape the rebels (now called: the ending introduces cancer ewok). All the amazing shows, but TV - this infeasible escape from reality - now seems to be intoxicated by pushing reality back to us (in recent years, you read an interview where one of the performers abandoned around the word "grounding"?).

Meanwhile, the laughing-track sitcom features deliberately unrealistic and representative characters, wearing perfect hair in the dark-free living room with invisible Greek laughter that surfaces… It can be said that this format is more artistic than ever, as it is more stylized than its hard truth elsewhere. These shows are essentially Strangeweirdness is closely related to art.

YouTuber makes videos that make laughter stand out from shows like this Friends and Big Bang Theory For the painfully awkward effect (“No laughter, it looks like a bunch of people who really hate each other,” one commenter observed). But the comedy with the audience laughs is its own unified thing, which is contained in a packaging that can be pleasing. I felt warm when I heard the laughter, and my tone was the sunny light. Soft yellow noise. You're not watching Jerry and Elaine alone, like you're watching them with a bunch of people. Seeing Jim and Pam's empty silence officehit differently, cooler and colder. Laughter makes us feel less lonely.

There is a creepy part. The original Laff box was used to add canned laughs to a TV show (yes, its name includes the double FF "Laff", which is indeed a complex box) containing 320 different laughs that were recorded in the 1950s. This covenant's sacred sitcom (stuffed with chicken skin, laughter and ticking) is used for Decades. Even modern sitcoms are often laughs recorded years or decades ago. You'll see where this situation goes (or maybe not a morbid idea): even after the box retired sometime in the 1970s, the practice of recording laughs continued. The show is usually created by partially dead viewers, rather than “filmed in front of live audiences.” Laff Box and its more modern versions trapped their expressions and stuffed them into laughter for endless recycling.

Say: Using live studio laughter and fully canned laughter (and using both the middle ground of using both, this is the most common tactic, the most common tactic today, as even multi-camera shows shoot some scenes outside). Shooting in front of an audience is often considered superior because it helps actors improve the timing of jokes and adjust the conversation in real time based on the audience’s reactions and makes notes based on subsequent responses. It's also contagious Saturday Night Live- Like the visible moments of the actors trying to keep the character when the jokes really work. In other words, studio audiences that provide laughter are more fun when shooting. But for our purposes we mix them together for a simple reason: the sound is the same. If you can't tell the difference, will there be a difference? Except for a certain percentage of the audience may be dead (sorry - too real?).

The story first appeared on May 7 of Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive magazines, click here to subscribe.