Cutting a joke is better than sweetening the track

The laugh track of an audience chortling along to a sitcom rubs some people the wrong way. That's because they misunderstand it

Allow me, if you would, to get this off my chest.

I have a television comedy currently being broadcast on a large American cable network.

It's a pretty traditional comedy - what you might call a "classic-style sitcom", if that doesn't seem like an oxymoron to you. And what people often say to me is: "Rob, I love your show but I hate the laugh track."

Now, I'm not sure they're being truthful about the first part - they may just be polite, who knows? - but I know they're being honest about the second part.

The "laugh track" - the sound of the studio audience laughing along with a television show as it's filmed - rubs certain people the wrong way. To them, it sounds entirely false. What they imagine, I assume, is that we film an episode in an enormous soundstage in dreary silence, with no audience anywhere nearby.

And then we add pre-recorded laughter later - probably harvested and saved from radio and television shows from the past, when people getting paid to be funny really had to be funny - to make it seem as if our tired and bland material really and truly earned the uproarious reaction it didn't, truthfully, receive.

In other words, my friends think I cheat. And when they tell me that they "love" my show, it's only to soften me up for the blow that follows: "But it's not nearly as funny as the fake laughter you insist on adding to it, you dishonest and shameless cretin." And that's what my friends say. Imagine how my enemies would put it.

So, for the record: it isn't really a "laugh track" you're hearing on most traditional television comedies, at least those that are shot in front of an audience.

Oh, yes, technically it's a "track" - a separate track of recorded sound. When we film an episode, we have the most expensive recording devices available perched above the live audience recording their laughter.

So in that sense it's a "laugh track", but that doesn't mean we paid some clever sound engineer to come in later and add more laughter.

That's what used to be called "sweetening" the track - the way you might add a little extra sugar to a recipe to make it slightly more toothsome.

But we don't sweeten. We don't bother to add laughter to jokes that didn't work just because we were too lazy to write jokes that would.

Yes, we're lazy - we're writers after all - but our laziness manifests itself in different ways, mostly in our personal relationships.

Professionally, we're pretty strict: a joke has to make us really laugh, then has to make the studio audience laugh, or we resort to a very simple remedy: we cut it.

And we shoot each show about five or six minutes too long so we can make those trims later, in the editing process, when we need to. In general, sweetening is hard, and expensive. Cutting is easy. And I'll always take the easy way out.

Still, some people complain. Some don't like the noise of the audience, or the implication that they need to be cued when to laugh. I usually try to explain the way it works. Sometimes, my friends get it.

But sometimes my friends will say - and here I'm using the term "friend" loosely - "Well, see, I watched your show last night and it wasn't funny at all.

"I mean," they continue, "I don't like your show really. I find it stupid and demeaning. But I watched it because we're friends and I was just so put off by the laugh track.

"I mean," they keep going, "I wasn't laughing at all but the audience was. How am I supposed to believe that people really found your show funny? At all?"

Well, what can I say? We've all sat in movies with other people who were laughing uproariously when we weren't.

And vice versa. What makes you giggle makes me roar. What makes me laugh makes you want to change the channel.

There's no accounting for taste - in television comedy or friends, apparently.

Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl