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If you love comedy and you love television, how can you not love Happy Days, Cheers, Frasier, Friends, and Seinfeld? Do you not like to laugh? First of all, a simple myth to dispel: it's not a "laugh track"! Muticam comedies are shot "in front of a live studio audience"...
and there's a mic over the audience. The laughter you hear is the audience laughing! Yes, it gets sweetened in post for duration or volume but we don't usually add laughs where no one laughed. (Unless you're shooting without an audience, then the crew's laughter is your guide.)
With the rise of single cam comedies & especially serialized half hour storytelling, people hear the laughter and it's incredibly off-putting. "Is this from the 70s???" "All that canned laughter-- I turned it off immediately!" So here are some reasons to keep the laughter:
First and foremost, hearing people laugh gives you permission to laugh along. It recreates the shared experience of being in a theater. Try an experiment. Watch a funny single cam and pay attention if you LOL. Watch a funny MC and see if you actually LOL more.
Second, it's live theater and shooting in front of an audience is just an amazing and special experience. It means instant feedback on jokes. You run in new lines when they fail (and btw that's why the dialog in MC is double-spaced, to rewrite the jokes!)
And the energy on the stage is electric. The actors perform so much better live and they feel the rhythm of the dialog when the audience is watching it unfold live.
Third, MC are cheaper and easier to shoot and if you value family and sleep, that's the schedule you want if you're an actor, writer, or crew.
But regardless of all that, MC format is not as "real" seeming and that's why it's gone out of favor in the last 20 years because reality tv made people crave authenticity. And it is less "real". The overhead lighting and lack of POV and OTS shots make it look fake.
Because it's theater! You're watching live theater! People pause unnaturally because they have to HFL (hold for laughs). Great actors would make up some "business" like picking lint off the jacket or thumbing through a magazine just waiting for the audience to stop laughing.
I remember Henry Winkler was the best at this. During the peak Fonz hysteria, he'd walk in the front door of the Cunninghams and have to HLF for 90 seconds as the audience went nuts. The "spread" (page count timing versus actual timing when you add audience laughter) was huge.
Writing MC is hard! You have to have a ton of jokes and writing set-ups that don't seem forced is an art form. And while aspiring writers turn their nose up at it, MC comedies are consistently the highest rated comedies, even today. People still love them.
So go in with a different mindset. Pretend you're there in the audience. I think NOW MORE THAN EVER we could all use some real laughs!
This is what it's like to make a single-camera comedy. Sometimes the actors come to set but mostly it's just setting up lights.
This is what it's like to make a multi-cam comedy.
