UNCANNY

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Is it possible that the laugh track fucked with Boomers’ and Gen Xers’ emotions? Watching sitcoms with laugh tracks was an enraging and confusing experience. Never mind interpretations of the laugh track as a cue to laugh. That can be true and trivial. Primarily, primally, the experience of hearing a laugh track is to hear yourself replaced. It’s doing it for you. Maybe you copy what’s being modeled but that’s you, speak for yourself. I was displaced, replaced by a laugh track.

Fast forward to the pre-social media days of the early 2000s when, as Maude Spekes, I cohosted with Sybilia Grogan a viewing of sitcoms without the laugh track. We wanted to experience these familiar shows without the forced-fun intrusion. You could find venues cheap; the back room behind the velvet curtain at the Pink Pony Cafe on Ludlow went for $30/hr so long as it was an off hour and we didn’t run over. (The first time I heard the expression “a hard out.”)

Mama’s Family (1983-1990), Carol Burnett as Eunice

Mama’s Family, a sitcom spinoff of the Carol Burnett Show about a toxic family, leaned on a laugh track that belied the crushing meanness, which made it perfect for our project. We screened it minus the laugh track, and let me tell you, Mama’s Family unsweetened left us like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?