Because hearing laughter when watching comic shows makes people inclined to regard them as funnier than they would normally. Really. Even when they are intelligent. Even when they know it's fake, canned laughter. I know this is hard to believe, but behavioural psychologists have run the tests, and the results are unambiguous: laugh tracks work, no matter how informed or intelligent the audience is. (Only have pop-sci books as sources for that, ask on Cognitive Science if you want the primary sources.)
As for why some shows do it and others don't: fundamentally, people who find a program funnier are more likely to keep watching, ergo more ad dollars. The downside is that some people might find the laugh track offensive and not watch out of spite. Clearly different producers have different expectations of which effect will predominate, which leads to different choices; the production cost of adding laugh tracks is rather small, and probably not decisive.
No comments:
Post a Comment