Assignment Two: Week Three Re-Cap
Week Three (my favourite week at university, because we start to get into the content, rather than introductory lessons) for Ready Camera One started off with a class discussion about the live soundtrack and canned laughter with a live audience, what we wanted to achieve through our own live studios and the ideologies of “sounding live” and the repercussions of this.
The reading for Week Three is the scholarly article “Sounding Live: An Institutional History of the Television Laugh Track” by Gina Giotta. The article itself explores the ideas of the laugh track, with it’s benefits and downfalls as well as having a live studio audience and how this can add to live TV production. Giotta reiterates that people that use canned laughter (i.e.: a fake laugh track) in their television productions, however, this can have a negative effect as discussed in the reading – with individuals not taking it as ‘seriously’ or almost anti-humorous, rather than having the positive effects that a live audience can bring. The reading states “the sound of laughing studio audiences has largely disappeared from primetime” – which is true. I think of shows like Saturday Night Live (which has a live studio audience) or shows like Modern Family, which omit it all together.
Personally, I prefer a live studio audience for its authenticity. I feel like sometimes a canned laughter can come off as quite fake and have the opposite effect of a usually funny joke. However, the reading discusses how the laugh track, although it can be negative in some aspects – it gives it an aspect of a “controlled liveness” as it is “Dangerously unpredictable in their audible responses but exceptionally important to maintaining the profitable immediacy cultivated by television, studio audiences were an institutional complication rendered superfluous by the introduction of the laugh track machine.”
The other point that I think is crucial to the understanding live audience is the genre of comedy – which relies solely on laughter and humour to make it successful. The quote “Feelings of sociability and of participation in a larger event were not only integral to the success of the medium but also to the success of the situation comedy” – think of a live audience at a comedy show: if no one else is laughing around you, you feel a bit sorry for the performer – right? Same deal with television productions. If no-one is laughing at the jokes, they’re not going to get a good response, thus, the energy is going to go down in the studio etc. Even studios nowadays have no-laugh track, such as Sex & The City, Malcolm in the Middle, The Office and 30 Rock, which are all mentioned in the reading.
The concepts that we discussed in class links to the reading, with strong associations to the canned laugh track and what we want to achieve through our live television productions in the course. We established that although lots of shows that we watched did have laugh tracks, the majority of them had omitted them altogether or had a live audience. For example, I just finished the TV series, The Nanny, which was shot in a multi-camera set up with a live studio audience for the majority of the episodes for the seven years that it was running on television. For that type of humour, I wouldn’t have laughed as much if it wasn’t a live audience, as it felt more real and that the jokes were actually funny (which they were!) but I felt like it would have taken away from some of that humour if it was a laugh track, which was an established notion amongst my peers as well.