DO NOT READ UNTIL AFTER EXPERIMENT

...laugh tracks. I've been obsessed with this topic ever since I first did a blog post about it. After participating in the experiment, you probably thought this was a test to see which comedy is funnier, Friends or The Office. Well, that wasn't the experiment's intent.

Evan A. Lieberman, Kimberly A. Neuendorf, James Denny, Paul D. Skalski, and Jia Wang conducted a laugh track case study and wrote The Language of Laughter: A Quantitative/Qualitative Fusion Examining Television Narrative and Humor in an attempt to uncover the laugh track's exact role in creating humor. Disturbed by the lack of research conducted on the subject, the researchists disproved their initial hypothesis and found successful creation of humor through laugh tracks may be solely dependent on the episode/TV show. In their study, The Andy Griffith Show's "Black Day for Mayberry" scored a significantly higher number of comic points (127) when watched WITHOUT a laugh track and significantly less number (83) when watched with. This is an interesting result when considering how many popular TV shows (such as Friends, The Andy Griffin Show, Seinfeld, etc.) include laugh tracks in their audio for the sole purpose of making it "easier" for their audience to laugh. The other three episodes tested in the experiment scored higher comic points when watched with a laugh track. But, the scores were still fairly close: 

"Opie the Birdman": with a laugh track (74) and without (65)

"Opie's Ill-Gotten Gains": with a laugh track (94) and without (76)

"Up in Barney's Room": with a laugh track (65) and without (62)

The language of laughter experiment concluded that an "episode is decidedly a significant factor in many audience outcomes, either as a direct (main effect) influence, or in interaction with the laugh track factor...[T]he quantitative findings confirm a view of distinctiveness of episodes, with Black Day for Mayberry particularly intriguing in its significant reversal of the expected laugh track impact" (Lieberman 506). These results can be interpreted to explain the success stories of two very different TV sitcoms Friends and The Office. How is it exactly that a show with a laugh track and show without can have the same considerably high amount of success in the comical world? Well, based on the research found in The Language of Laughter, I believe it's reasonable to conclude The Office and Friends as shows are completely different and this influences how successful a laugh track is or isn't. The Office’s content may be constructed in a way which allows it to be most successful without a laugh track. The long pauses and awkward silences are hilarious to The Office’s appreciative audiences. Furthermore, I speculate that The Office’s absence of a laugh track allows the audience more autonomy, more freedom of interpretation when it comes to what content is funny in an episode. Much like information processing is used in political satire to inspire humorous situations, the same phenomenon could happen in shows without employment of a laugh track. However, though the specific stylistic design of having no laugh track works well in The Office, the same cannot be said for Friends. Perhaps, just as some episodes in the Andy Griffith show worked better with a laugh track, Friends employment is beneficial to laughter success. Friends’ does, in fact, present jokes in a less rapid fashion. Having no laugh track could leave the show in its entirety sounding empty and less joke-filled.