TVSquad pointed the way to a blog by Ken Levine who, according to his bio, is “an Emmy winning writer/director/producer/major league baseball announcer.” And now he is a blogger. Oh how the mighty have fallen. Anyway, Ken writes up an interesting post today about the demise of canned laughter. Pretty interesting.

Network thinking about laugh tracks is this: When you see a comedy movie in a theatre you are surrounded by people laughing. The laugh track helps recreate that communal experience when you’re sitting in your home alone. For fifty years networks have stuck by this theory despite not one shred of evidence to suggest it is valid.

Finally, now, networks are beginning to come around. Audiences have loudly stated they want new rhythms in sitcoms. They’ve also said they hate laugh tracks. And since some of the recent better comedies (like SCRUBS and the OFFICE) don’t use one and are embraced, networks are relaxing their yuck box choke hold.
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One final note: On CHEERS and FRASIER we used recorded laughs from our own shows. Not so with other series. A lot of the laughs you hear were recorded fifty years ago. Many of the people you hear laughing are now dead.

You shouldn’t be satisfied with this blockquote! You should be inspired to read it for yourself.

On a personal note, I always thought it would be awesome to have a laugh track of my own. It would be nice when you make a great joke that includes an obscure reference and no one laughs. Fire up the laugh track and then they know they missed something instead of looking at me like I’m crazy because I just referenced a Head of the Class character. The other added benefit would be to fire the laugh track when you or someone else says something innocuous to make everyone wonder what was so funny.

…or adapt it to work over the internet somehow to punch up a paragraph that after you re-read you realized it wasn’t funny at all. You know, stuff like that.