Sounding Live

Abstract

This article complicates popular and scholarly discourses that understand the television laugh track as a crutch for bad jokes or a means to routinize audience response. By exploring early institutional histories, I demonstrate that broadcasters adopted the maligned technology to “fix” what was widely understood during the 1950s as the problem of the live studio audience. In aurally overriding—and sometimes altogether replacing—the studio audience, the laugh track allowed the industry to exorcise the capricious human element from the production process while still conjuring the parasocial aura that helped to both differentiate television from film and ensure the new medium’s smooth entrance into the home. After tracing this counter-history, I turn briefly to the new breed of laugh track-free comedies to illustrate the movement of the laugh track’s basic logics of liveness and parasociability into a constellation of formal and aesthetic devices central to the emergent genre.