#he wasn’t!! he was very good at a specific style of defense that became obsolete as karlsson & josi rose to prominence!!

[brockachu]

sorry cleaning my archives has turned me into an old dude (gender neutral) screamingsobbing about even older dudes 👉🏽👈🏽 do y’all still respect me?

[flannelsfloorboardsandflavo-blog]

Laugh at This: Exploring the Comedic Value of the Laugh Track (Rationale)

By: Michal Cylwik

Goals: The purpose of my audio project was to examine how the sound of laughter contributes to the overall comedic tone and nature of any given phrase, conversation, action, scene, or any piece of media as a whole. In order to demonstrate the effects that laughter can have on creating a light tone and a humorous environment, I noticed that within television comedies exists a dichotomy between multi-camera sitcoms which are written and performed in a way that incorporates the audience into the medium versus comedies that are performed and produced to imitate real-life humorous interactions. By omitting audience reactions from media where it’s normally present and by integrating audience reactions into film where it’s normally absent, I intended to demonstrate the effects of audience laughter on the viewer’s perception of the humor.

Affordances: My project’s focus on sitcoms required me to use video as the medium because so much of comedy can be conveyed through action and physicality. This visual aspect works in conjunction with the actual content of the words and the comedic stylings of the performer in order to create a multimodal form of entertainment and commentary. Originally, I wanted to explain the history of live audiences in television and then argue the ways in which the presence of audience reactions impacts the viewer. However, as I started to gather material, the time constraint forced me to focus my project, so I decided to demonstrate specifically how a laugh track (or lack thereof) can change the interpretation of a conversation or an entire artifact. My first attempt at this was to download a scene from a sitcom that does use a laugh track and use Audacity to separate the dialogue, music, sound effects, keynotes, and audience reaction so that I could mute just the laugh track and play the scene without it. This became an issue because I learned that separating instrumentals from vocals was possible because the software could recognize the difference in frequency of instruments versus a human voice, which would make separating the spoken dialogue from the laugh track incredibly difficult. Luckily I was able to find some clips on Youtube (courtesy of the channel SBOSS) that had the sitcoms with the laugh track already extracted from it. I was disappointed that I couldn’t physically edit a video like that, however I knew that adding laugh cues would be possible. I used iMovie to put this project together which I knew would suffice because I only had to insert title cards and then lay an audio track (laugh cues) over a movie clip. When composing the laugh track over the police station scene from Manchester by the Sea, I found a dozen sitcom laugh tracks (ranging from 3 seconds to 40 seconds) available on iMovie and using the split tool I was able to extract specific laughs and crowd dynamics and integrate them into dramatic beats of the conversation.

Audience: My audience for this project is for people who have strong opinions either for or against laugh tracks in sitcoms. My experience is that most people my age and younger tend to find the laugh track jarring and unsettling while others can point to an easy argument that suggests that a laugh track is able to coerce the receiver into believing that certain dialogue is funny or even appropriate. I believe that both sides have interesting arguments and I think each format has its own affordances and limitations.

Decision Making: When deciding what I wanted to include in my multimodal argument, I originally wasn’t planning on including any examples of a sitcom with its original laugh track intact. However, I came across “The Marine Biologist” episode of Seinfeld and I felt that the final scene was a strong indication of how comedic tension can be manipulated when the performer is receiving audible feedback on their delivery as they say their lines. Michael Richards demonstrates this perfectly with the amount of time he lets pass between the big reveal of the golf ball and his response. In that time, the audience is roaring in laughter and the energy is almost palpable through the screen as both the viewer and the characters are waiting for Kramer’s response. Richards is able to feed off that reaction in order to deliver his punchline at the exact moment when the tension is at its highest, and when he releases that tension with his line, the audience laughs even harder. While that displayed the affordances of an audience reaction in a sitcom, one of the Friends laugh-extracted scenes that I found online was able to highlight how the absence of laughter can entirely change the tone and context of a conversation. Ross is having a casual and friendly argument with Rachel and Phoebe throughout this episode, but the self-defense instructor he’s talking with in this clip has no context for his inquiries, which are pretty creepy and unsettling without the laughter of an audience who understand the characters and know that Ross is kind of a wimp who would never physically hurt his friends. What I was most excited to approach creatively was adding laugh track cues to a very serious scene. While my project in its entirety lays out an argument, the remix I made of Manchester by the Sea with a laugh track was where I was able to make the most creative choices in constructing an audio artifact. I chose one of the heaviest scenes from one of the most depressing movies I could think of and when I thought of Lee learning that he’s not going to be held liable at all for his irresponsibility that resulted in the death of all his children, I saw all the silence and the dramatic beats between lines as an opportunity to make every phrase in that scene come off like a joke. The somber atmosphere of this film (and particularly of this scene) juxtaposed with a hilarious roaring audience can draw a strong reaction for the audience that I felt supported my argument about the impact of audience laughter. Finally, I decided to frame some of the media arguments that I presented with commentary from industry professionals. CNN’s The 2000s is a documentary series that has two episodes that focus solely on television in the 2000s, the decade in which the traditional multi-camera sitcom began to grow obsolete within the industry. Jim Parsons has won 4 Emmys for his role on The Big Bang Theory, which does have a laugh track, so his commentary about the unique elements of performing comedy in front of a studio audience was fitting for my example of how a performer in a sitcom is able to capitalize on that aspect. Meanwhile, Phil Rosenthal, the creator of Everybody Loves Raymond one of the most successful multi-camera sitcoms of the last 25 years, explains that the entire method of production and filming is affected by the live audience and I felt that was a good transition from arguing the strengths and benefits of a laugh track before my project considered the other side of this argument where I demonstrate how the omission or addition of a laugh track can drastically manipulate viewers’ attitudes.

Theory/Course Readings: McKee’s article “Sound Matters: Notes Toward the Analysis and Design of Sound in Multimodal Webtexts” was our first assigned text of the unit and it was her assessment of the elements of vocal performance in multimodal texts that inspired me to explore one specific vocal sound: laughter. McKee describes that when words are spoken, listeners “adhere to how those words are said. Thus, meaning is carried…by the vocal qualities,” which supports her overall argument that the vocal sounds of the speaker are just as important in creating meaning with the listener as is the content of the speech (McKee, 340). Once I realized I wanted to do a project about laughter, the other reading that I felt related to my topic was Ong’s “Orality, Literacy, and Modern Media”. Ong describes an important relationship between sound and speed. This relationship is unique only to sound and speed because “sound exists only when it is going out of existence,” which is a relevant concept to my theme of comedy because the pace of dialogue exchanged between characters in a sitcom varies based on whether or not the actor is engaging with and expecting an audience reaction between lines (Ong, 85).

Reflection: As a lover of television and specifically sitcoms, my stance had always been that even though some quality comedies used laugh tracks, it was mostly a crutch which allowed the development and production of multi-camera sitcoms to be so cheap and reliable since the genesis of television. My original intention was to just have some editing fun with this project because ultimately I felt my stance on this particular issue wouldn’t change much (laugh tracks = forced; no laugh track = organic). However, my research led me to better understand that the addition of audience reactions, while only audio, still increases the multi-modality of the artifact because the audio and dialogue within the cannon of the program is in essence a different medium than the sounds of the audience reacting. I also learned how laughter communicates a specific emotion that is almost contagious in its ability to ignite laughter from others which makes sense to me because I’ve always thought that comedy is most effective when it’s a shared experience, therefore laughter is an audible reaction that is heavily impacted by the tone of the surrounding environments. These two realizations that I came to while working on my project led me to this conclusion: while the inclusion of studio audience reactions often works to manipulate viewers’ opinions on the quality of humor in sitcoms, the laugh track can also welcome viewers to participate vicariously via the studio audience in the multi-modal experience of television.

Bibliography:

McKee, Heidi. “Sound Matters: Notes toward the Analysis and Design of Sound in Multimodal Webtexts.” Computers & Composition, vol. 23, no. 3, Sept. 2006, pp. 335–354. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2006.06.003.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word. Methuen, 1982.

“The 2000s.” Netflix, CNN, 2019.