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Currents
The giggle machine
By Matthew Gilbert
Dr. Doug Ross, his stubbly chin bobbing compassionately, his brown eyes
wide and soulful, delivers the tragic news to the shy 12-year-old. She
has ridden a gurney into NBC's ER with severe leg pains, and test results
have revealed the worst possible scenario: cancer. Not only will she lose
her leg to amputation, Ross tells her, but she may not make her next
birthday.
It's a heartbreaking TV moment, with the stoic little girl begging for an
uncensored diagnosis and Ross complying with her wish. And suddenly you
can hear it, behind actor George Clooney's dialogue, the gentle sounds of
communal sniffling and sobbing, like the group grief at a self-help
seminar or the audience at the last five-hanky Meryl Streep vehicle.
Sniff, sniff, snort. Weep, weep. Then the ER scene builds in an emotional
crescendo - now Dr. Ross must inform the girl's parents - and the keening
begins. Loud, full-bodied boo-hooing, the kind of wailing generally heard
at the most unexpected of funerals.
The tear track: No, it doesn't really exist. The idea of
machine-generated sorrow to signal audiences at sad junctures in ER is,
of course, preposterous, the sort of loony notion that might have
captured the imagination of, say, Ed Wood and become an object of camp
fascination for future generations. It would be as absurd as laying a
soundtrack of heavy breathing and lewd moans onto an NYPD Blue sexual
encounter.
Why is it, then, that viewers so readily accept the tear track's giddy
sibling, the laugh track, the canned chuckles and giggles and guffaws
that litter our most popular of TV formats, the sitcom? As we watch our
portion of the more than 50 half-hour comedies on prime-time network TV
each week, we take the metallic mirth for granted, even though it is a
bold falsification of what is joyously and definitively human: laughter.
We've been subjected to laugh tracks so steadily since their inception in
the 1950s that we've grown quite unaware of them, even as they become
brasher with each new season. Even as, in the case of shows like MASH
they are used on scenes set so far from civilization that there isn't the
slightest possibility of an actual human assembly.
Ironically, the laugh track was developed by sound engineer Charlie
Douglas primarily to deemphasize the laughter of the live studio audience
and to even out its natural irregularities. It was meant to take
attention away from the audience. But its
purpose quickly became less artistic and more cynical, so that by the
1960s, I Dream of Jeannie and My Mother the Car were portrayed as virtual
laugh riots. Nowadays, laugh tracks are used in service of market testing
and subliminal messaging and as a network tool to hype viewers by giving
them amphetamine-like bursts of affirmation. This show is funny, they
say. This network is a happy place.
Of course, the worse the writing, the louder the laugh track. Some of the
stupidest shows have relied the most heavily on canned titters to
compensate for their deficit of humor. The very bottom of this season's
barrel of sitcoms - UPN's The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer and Fox's
Living in Captivity, to name two - were presented as cacophonies of
hysterical enjoyment.
In terms of manipulative gimmicks, laugh tracks are right up there with
slick ads and those button-pushing newsmagazine stories about hidden
nanny-cams. They urge us to laugh, even when the jokes aren't funny; they
openly work to erode our critical faculties. They are pushy, steely,
unnervingly happy - a "Have a nice day" from a salesman who secretly
wants to pick your pocket. While, on the positive side, laugh tracks may
make lone TV viewers feel less isolated in their homes, they also present
an implicit sense of peer pressure: "Well, if all those people think this
show is good - "
Laugh tracks speak to the passive side of TV viewing, planting the word
"funny" in a mind already receptive to the notion. NBC, for instance,
knows that a significant number of viewers are so submissive that they
don't even change channels on a given night. That's why it could make a
hit of the dismal Veronica's Closet by slotting it in the middle of its
popular Thursday lineup. Why shouldn't the network then think that
pasting laughter onto the vacuous Caroline in the City would make it seem
amusing?
The comedies that have escaped the laugh track are formula-busters like
the hourlong Ally McBeal, animated shows like The Simpsons, and cable
series like The Larry Sanders Show and Sex and the City that aren't
dogged by executives obsessed with guarantees. They are shows that have
avoided the least appealing tendencies of TV comedy writing in the 1990s:
immediate-gratification humor, the stand-up aesthetic that offers the
cycle of punch line and laugh track without much character or wisdom
sandwiched in between. They aim to be something better than doses of good
feeling to fill the space between ads.
This fall, Aaron Sorkin, the creator of ABC's Sports Night, brought some
visibility to the issue of canned laughter by fighting with network
honchos to keep his half-hour show track-free. He didn't want his media
comedy, which makes bold detours into drama, to wear the same packaging
as more flip sitcoms like Suddenly Susan. He wanted to expand the horizon
for comedy on prime time.
Alas, Sorkin lost his laugh-track battle, not only to the fear of change
but to television's unfunniest quality: the underestimation of the
viewing public's intelligence.
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Wade T. Smith
morbius@channel1.com | "There ain't nothin' you
wade_smith@harvard.edu | shouldn't do to a god."
******* http://www.channel1.com/users/morbius/ *******