Every time I hear this observation, I automatically hear Jim Carrey's voice in my head saying "It's dead people laughing! Those people are dead!"

I guess he said it in the 1999 movie Man On The Moon and the line has somehow been permanently lodged in the back of my brain for the last 25 years

there is a statistically high likelihood that any individual audience member you hear laughing on certain modern TV shows may have been dead for decades.

Serves them right for being in a canned laughter track!

No but seriously, that's both haunting and beautiful at the same time. They live on. Like laughing ghosts.

It's just a passing shower thought

Friends without a laugh track is 1000% funnier.

Especially Ross.....who becomes basically a serial killer vibe.

In The Big Bang Theory without the laugh track, Raj becomes just a huuuuuuge asshole.

There was a great take on one of these called “Everybody Hates Raymond”

It was the show Everybody Loves Ramon but the laugh track was completely replaced with boos and was frickin hilarious. I think it got removed from YouTube though cuz I haven’t been able to find it for years.

Holy shit, this is much better than the original!!! Damn, I should rewatch the series like this. Where can I find all of it without the laugh track?

Edit: I have to add, the long pauses make it a bit annoying. With the laugh track the pauses aren't noticeable (to me at least; my girlfriend did notice the long pauses even with the laugh track, and it was annoying to her).

Used to love watching the IT crowd

I feel like laugh tracks are way to manipulate the audience. The reason they have to manipulate the audience is the joke wasn't all that funny. If you don't have a laugh track or a live audience then you have to actually be funny. Your jokes actually have to make people laugh in an organic way.

I'm talking about laugh tracks. They are fake. The sound of laughter is homogenous. If you listen to a real audience, some people laugh louder, some softer. Also with laugh tracks, you can tell someone is turning a volume knob or slider on a mixer. It's all fake.

That is an instant skip for me. Same with the vertical split with just pointing at the video and adding nothing of substance while shrinking the video

When I lived in Los Angeles I used to go to some of those shows. It was pretty fun. One of my favorite shows from back then was All in The Family. Of course I didn't get to see that one live cuz I don't think they even filmed that in California. That would have been awesome though.

The reason why they no longer do live studio is a TV star got followed home by someone in the audience and they tried/planned to hurt her. After that they used laugh tracks, and other shows followed suite when they realized that audiences didn't really care. Made it easier to film

That show is some of the most genius content of the last decade.

Your description way undersells it.

Kevin Can Fuck Himself is about a woman who wants to kill her husband Kevin because she thinks it's the only way she'll ever get it of her marriage.

Whenever Kevin is in the room it's lit and filmed like a multi camera sitcom. He says and does horrible things to his wife and the laugh track runs. It's a really scathing criticism of how sitcom wives are treated.

But the real genius comes when Kevin and his friends are out of the room. Suddenly it becomes lit and shot as a single camera drama. I absolutely love it. It's so effective.

Some of those jokes were actually amusing. I don't know why they didn't have a real audience. Most people will come for free just to watch the show.

Wow, that first one was horrible. Someone was screaming like maybe they were getting murdered.