Here is a great analogy.  Someone yawns.  You see them yawn, and often uncontrollably, you yawn in response.  This is a programmed response in your body.  It is a way to align sleep cycles with the people in your community or family unit.  A slightly more graphic example is the way in which women’s estrous cycles line up when they share common space.  It’s nature’s way of putting people in your community on the same page.

I think laugh tracks serve the same purpose.  Entertainment as an industry, puts out an incredibly fractured offering of content.  It’s all over the place, from dark comedies, to bro-comedies to slapstick, there is a varied style in which to laugh.  However, personality differences aside, most people have consumed a fair share of network sitcoms in their lives.  Most people who read Blommit can probably remember back to the days of T.G.I.F.  Those Friday nights, having sleepovers with your friends, hunkering down in front of the television to watch Steve Urkel screw something up, or Corey Mathews make moves on Topanga.  The one thing all of those shows had in common were laugh tracks.

Laugh tracks aren’t any different than seeing someone yawn or “smelling the menstruation”, they are a way of culturally aligning people’s senses of humor.  Hear me out.  Laughter is contagious, if you’ve ever been around a small child in the throws of a giggle fit, you know this is true.  What a laugh track seeks to do is to point out the areas of a show where the writers have inserted a joke.  By hearing other people laugh, regardless of whether it was canned or not, your natural reaction is to join in the laughter.  Over time, you are conditioned to laugh at the same types of things as the other people watching the same shows.  You know the right times to laugh, and when it is not appropriate (as deemed by ABC).  Your sense of humor gets a sort of central anchor point that allows you to relate to others, even if you find other things funny that they don’t.

You might be thinking this a sort of conspiracy theory type of idea, a super paranoid thought.  It’s not at all, I think it’s a great thing, giving us all a means of relating to one another.  But you might be skeptical, so let’s consider an example.  Let’s say you are watching a movie by yourself, something I think we’ve all done at one point or another.  For the sake of the argument, we’ll  say it’s a comedy that you are enjoying.  How many times do you laugh out loud when you are by yourself watching something without laugh tracks.  I would contend that it is dramatically fewer than when you are in the company of others or in the presence of a laugh track.  In this case you are enjoying what you are watching, but you may be laughing or finding humor in different parts than someone else would find funny.  It’s because you aren’t being aligned with a cultural standard of humor, either by someone in the room or the inserted laughter of a sitcom.

I wish I could add laugh tracks to this as you are reading it.  It would probably make it a lot more enjoyable, and might help me make my case.  In the end, you may totally disagree with this idea.  But would it be such a bad thing to have been given a way to always be able to relate to your friends?  To have people laugh at the jokes you make because they understand the timing and context that you both learned as a child?  I don’t think so.  I mean, there is probably a reason why most people didn’t smile in older paintings or photographs.  Humor was confined to small groups or communities.  Laugh tracks have given you a way to make people all around the country, or even the world, laugh at the things you do or say.  And there isn’t anything wrong with that.

I respect you, actors and actresses.

You try and capture life and play it back.  And while a writer or an artist do the same thing, we don’t actually do it.  We don’t reenact the moment itself.  We experienced something.  We vomited it back out on to paper or canvas or wireframe.  But you take the most intimate human moments, moments that sometimes only one other person will ever witness, and recreate it for the gazing crowd.

I can try to write pillow talk that aches and breathes, but you make it ache.  You breathe it out into our faces.

I can try and write a speech where the protagonist screams at his dead father in a rainstorm.  You actually go out into a field of rain, screaming and crying until the muscles in your face hurt.

I can write a scene where a man eats raisin bran alone.  His hair is unwashed.  His clothes are no longer meant for the real world’s eyes, just sightless milk jugs and dirty dishes.  You actually sit there.  You eat the raisins and the bran flakes.  We watch you.  And so it is real.

As opposed to me, who may have never spoken to a girl and pillows, may have never screamed at the rain, may have never eaten unwashed.  Because if no one sees it, it never happened.