With the recent news of How I Met Your Father’s cancelation, things are not looking good for a device that used to be instrumental to the sitcom form, the laugh track. How I Met Your Father, which was canceled after only 2 seasons at Hulu, told the story of a tight-knit friend group’s attempts to navigate romance and modern life, framed as a story told by protagonist Sophie (Hilary Duff) to her young son. The series took its lead from its hugely successful predecessor, How I Met Your Mother, which aired on CBS for 9 seasons from 2005-2014. Despite the promising start, How I Met Your Father season 3 will not happen.
HIMYF played things safe, seeking to reproduce the original series’ success with a similar central concept, numerous in-universe references, and even a similarly conventional sitcom device, the laugh track. However, the TV landscape has shifted drastically since 2005, and an attempt to carry a classic sitcom’s success over to streaming didn’t end well for Hulu. The laugh track doesn’t match the tone and pace of modern mainstream TV comedy. While the convention has been tied to the sitcom for almost the entirety of the form’s existence, the laugh track is no longer essential to the medium, and may well be on its way out permanently.
How I Met Your Father Was One Of The Last Major Laugh Track Sitcoms
The writing was already on the walls for laugh tracks when How I Met Your Mother began airing in 2005. Of the other major sitcoms to begin airing that year – The Office, My Name is Earl, American Dad, Extras, and Everybody Hates Chris – none used the device. By the time How I Met Your Father hit screens in 2022, almost no shows were still using the trope. What’s more, How I Met Your Father was the only laugh track sitcom being pushed by a major streamer. If streaming is the future of TV, then the industry doesn’t seem to see laugh tracks as a part of that future.
The Conners Still Uses A Laugh Track
There is one other major sitcom that’s still using a laugh track, ABC’s The Conners. However, the highly-rated Conners ought to be understood as a last vestige of the old guard, rather than the champion of something vital and relevant. The series airs on network television, where audiences skew older; like HIMYF, The Conners is also a legacy sitcom, owing much of its success to the hugely popular 80s sitcom Roseanne of which it is a direct continuation. Moreover, The Conners is due to end next year, with no plans to spin off. The upcoming Frasier revival will also use a laugh track, but this is not a new sitcom.
Why The Laugh Track Doesn’t Suit Modern Comedy Shows
There’s good reason for modern comedy series to drop the laugh track. The trope is great for reinforcing the humor of the classic setup-punchline comedy style, but modern sitcoms don’t leave obvious gaps for laughs. In broad terms, most current sitcoms follow in either the irreverent comedy of The Simpsons, wherein the absence of a laugh track allows more jokes to be packed into every scene, or the cringe comedy of, for example, The Office, wherein the silence following an awkward moment underscores the comedy better than canned laughter ever could.
The Origins Of The 70-Year-Old Sitcom Trend
1951’s I Love Lucy is largely credited as the first sitcom to be filmed in front of a live studio audience. The immediacy of the reactive audience allowed the actors to enrich their performances by playing off the laughs. The notion of using pre-recorded audience laughter came from CBS sound engineer Charley Douglass, who found himself frustrated at the unpredictability of studio audiences. His solution, the “Laff Box”, was first applied to The Hank McCune Show sometime in the 1950s. The innovation spread like wildfire. Before long, every sitcom that didn’t have a live studio audience, and even some that did, found their comedy supplemented by pre-recorded laughter.
The Laugh Track Will Never Go Away Entirely
None of the best sitcoms of the last decade made use of a laugh track. However, the laugh track’s 70-year tenure saw its rise coincide with the rise of television itself. At the very least, the device will live a nostalgic half-life in which it’s ironically or sentimentally applied to new TV shows. Moreover, live studio audiences will always persist in the form of variety shows, specials, and live sketch shows such as Saturday Night Live. While How I Met Your Father’s cancelation may signal the end of the laugh track’s association with sitcoms, it will always be a part of the medium it helped build.
