Well, Frasier Redux is pretty much what we expected. It’s not great. It’s not terrible. One of the unquestioned failures, according to a few tabloid reports, is that blasted “laugh track”. Out on the desolate plains of social media, the disappointed viewers are more precise (and less accurate). “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’t tell if the contributors are suffering from selective amnesia or if they just feel the genre has moved on. But the current cackles were gathered in much the same way as those on the original series. It is not “canned laughter”. That phrase refers to prerecorded mirth, most often dubbed on to a show shot with no outside observers. Both Frasier and Frasier: Wrath of Khan were, as their distinguished predecessor Cheers always assured us, “filmed before a live studio audience”. Some post-recording “sweetening” takes place in such productions, but you’re largely hearing the genuine response of amused southern Californians.
Not one of the eight shows currently nominated for outstanding comedy series at the upcoming Emmys has a chuckle track. Can you imagine such a thing on Only Murders in the Building? A lot has changed. Only one of those shows – two if you stretch to Ted Lasso – counts as a traditional situation comedy. And even Abbot Elementary leans into the recently unavoidable mockumentary strand. Frasier Strikes Back echoes to the beats of another era.
The reaction to Frasier’s “laugh track” prompts us to wonder how such a bizarre convention ever came to pass. Viewers may now squirm at new material so presented. But the same people will happily sit through reruns of Cheers or Fawlty Towers without baulking at the audience’s hoots. Out there on YouTube you can find unsettling scenes from Friends and Frasier with the laughter removed. The huge silences left for audiences to pull themselves together press home the artificiality of the convention. Unlaughed Frasier, in particular, comes across like the work of Harold Pinter. Of course, all television – all drama – is loaded with artifice and unreality. Old-school sitcom sets were three-walled, the fourth face opening out on to the studio audience. We never swivelled around to see the view from Jerry Seinfeld’s sofa. What was forever behind us in the foyer of Fawlty Towers? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the plain?
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Where was I? Oh yes.
There is, however, something particularly strange about the audience noises invariably imposed on comic TV until the mid-1990s. No other scripted shows did that. You didn’t get gasps of surprise when Geraldine McEwan revealed the murderer in a Miss Marple. No unseen parties sobbed when Colin Firth finally got together with Jennifer Ehle in Pride and Prejudice. The origins date from live recording in the early days of TV and radio. As movie directors will still tell you, the packed premieres of comic films are particularly unnerving experiences. There is, until the credits roll, no audial measure of a drama’s success. Does utter silence communicate enrapture? Possibly. It may also communicate drowsiness. If they don’t laugh, however, you can be pretty sure they didn’t find it funny.
Until the arrival of broadcasting, audiences expected to experience scripted comedy in a communal environment. You didn’t need to dub laughter on to a Marx Brothers movie. Television barely existed. Home video was the stuff of science fiction. If you were watching Duck Soup then you were watching it surrounded by guffaws. One person’s laughter gave his or her neighbour permission to join in. That doesn’t work so well if it’s just you, your mum and the cat.
The underrated Dream On and the rightly legendary Larry Sanders Show demonstrated that TV audiences did not need prodding to know when to snort
The history of the laugh track is not what you might expect. What we call canned laughter actually preceded the return of the studio audience. US shows in the 1950s were, like films, often recorded with a single camera, in the manner of a movie. Even animated shows such as The Flintstones had artificial laugh tracks. In the early 1970s, multicamera shows, shot more like plays, allowed audiences back into the mix (literally).
There was always grumbling about the practice, but it was not until the rise of HBO in the Bill Clinton years that the convention began to shatter. The underrated Dream On and the rightly legendary Larry Sanders Show demonstrated that TV audiences did not need prodding to know when to snort. No immediate avalanche resulted. But the practice gradually wore away, particularly on cable shows, until we ended up with fans yelling baffled at the laughed-up Frasier 2: Judgment Day.
The audience-enhanced sitcom had charm. The beats of Cheers or Dad’s Army would be different without that addition. But there probably is no going back. Laughter has left the building.
