There are few things more likely to raise the hackles of a comedy snob than the notion of “canned laughter”. A sitcom with a laugh track – not so much canned, these days, as a recorded live audience reaction – implies that it will be an old-fashioned sort of comedy. We are living in an era that rewards a more naturalistic approach.
Gag-soaked sitcoms such as 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which barely give you time to honk before moving on to the next one-liner, do not feel the need to guide you to the punchline.
Not a single one of the nominees for this year’s outstanding comedy series award at the Emmys comes pre-loaded with laughter. Fleabag, Barry, The Good Place and even the delightfully silly Schitt’s Creek all leave you to do the work yourself. If it’s funny, you may crack up. But they aren’t about to tell you where and when to do it.
Yet a new study has revealed that the addition of a laugh track does make jokes seem funnier. Sophie Scott, a professor of cognitive neuroscience, led a research team at University College London. They put 40 “dad jokes” – the best bad jokes, at least five steps up from a Christmas cracker joke – to volunteers, and found that every one was considered funnier when it was accompanied by the sound of another person laughing.
Fake laughter did the trick. And real, spontaneous laughter worked even better. “What this study shows is that adding laughter to a joke increases the humour value, no matter how funny or unfunny the joke is,” said Scott. A less scientific conclusion would be this: Miranda knew what was up.
It’s no surprise that the comedies that most often win critical acclaim are the gorgeous, subtle ones that dance around the edges of jokes – as if coming too close to funny might burn them. I usually love these comedies. But many of the big, successful beasts of the genre, the ones that either broke ratings records or have endured far beyond their original lives, have been accompanied by a laugh track.
Seinfeld, Friends, Father Ted, The Big Bang Theory, Will & Grace, Mrs Brown’s Boys and Absolutely Fabulous, to name just a few, all brought their laughs along with them, usually via a live studio audience.
The internet has had a field day with both adding laugh tracks, and taking them away. There is a YouTube rabbit hole to be explored in clips from shows like Friends and The Big Bang Theory, with the studio reactions edited out.
They turn seemingly gentle set-ups into either conversations with arthouse levels of banality or, in the case of Ross from Friends, make him look like a bona fide psychopath. Then there’s the opposite: adding a laugh track to a horror movie – The Shining with Seinfeld slap-bass and laughter – is particularly discombobulating. Search “inappropriate laugh track” and watch your day disappear into “funny” versions of Breaking Bad, or Carrie, or Titanic.
Laugh tracks are effective. We are more easily manipulated than we like to think, more sheep-like, and more pliable. But Scott’s study also suggests that laughing is better as a communal experience. Of course it is, because it’s contagious. This is why Facebook compilation videos of babies laughing are as addictive as E-numbers and essentially irresistible.
It’s why laughter yoga, which allows a fake laugh to develop into a real one in order to release stress, works. It’s why I spend more time than I should watching sitcom blooper reels, and often secretly think that seeing other people collapse into fits of laughter when they have fluffed a line might be more enjoyable than the sitcoms themselves. It’s why someone falling over and laughing about it on You’ve Been Framed is funnier than someone falling over and crying because it hurt so much.
Laughing alone is fine, and it is becoming the norm, at least when it comes to entertainment, because watching television together is increasingly rare. With such an array of choice, and with most of us having our own screens in our hands or on our laps, we can watch what we want, when we want to – individually, without having to compromise. Laughing along with someone else, though, is better.
I am happy to settle in for the commitment of a 13-hour foreign-language drama about mountains entirely alone. But I’d much rather watch a comedy in company, in a state of silly communal hysteria, even if it’s been brought on by dad jokes.
• Rebecca Nicholson is a Guardian columnist
