The industry’s ambivalence toward the practice was best summed up in a cursory Billboard magazine item in 1955: “TV production chief Babe Unger hates canned laugh tracks, but thinks audience ...

Critically reviled. Hopelessly dated. Forever near extinction. Yet in a TV landscape full of brutally realistic hits, sitcoms with background laughter are not only still popular, but have become ...

more recently known in the trade as "sweetened" audience laughter, canned laughter to its enemies, is finally stone-cold dead in its eighth decade. Many, it is fair to say, will not mourn.

Chances are that it was—or will be. The laugh was captured on tape for Desilu Productions’ library of canned laughter, from which the sound tracks of the company’s shows can borrow anything ...

“Canned laughter, which this is, sounds bad,” he said. “But without it, our shows were flat, you were hurting them. That was a safety net for producers, believe me.” Perry Simon, former ...

“What the hell is with the canned laughter?” asks Kyle. “The fake canned laughter is REALLY annoying,” Dave follows up. “Horrendous canned laughter,” notes Mol. And on and on. We can ...

These run everything in our life. If they run at all. I too am ticked off at the phony canned laughter on TV sitcoms. Their inappropriate exaggeration ruins the shows. Young Sheldon, the #1 comedy ...

At 7:00 that evening, "The Hank McCune Show" used the first laugh track to compensate for being filmed without a live audience. The rest is history. Canned laughter may sound artificial ...