Victor and Aaron discuss TV comedies, inspired by an article that takes a deep dive into the history of laugh tracks.

Discover 10 clever and genuinely funny sitcoms that skip the canned laughter and offer smart, character-driven comedy.

Soon, producers realized that they could do away with the audience and just use canned laughter. Douglass was essentially the only game in town, at least in the United States.

It didn’t have a laugh track. Ironically, the show was one where two pilots were shown, one with and one without a laugh track. The resulting data ensured future shows would have fake laughter.

Coch said there are several kinds of laughter, including polite laughter, nervous laughter, contagious laughter, the belly laugh, silent laughter, canned laughter, irrepressible laughter and evil ...

One might look at laugh track sitcoms like an observing anthropologist: Here is the half-hour program with canned laughter in its natural broadcast habit, driven to near extinction since the 1990s ...

Why Does Laughter Have Such a Strange Power Over Us? An anthropologist explores why the phenomenon has the ability to delight, disturb and disrupt ...

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 from a solitary snicker to waves of ...