A family member has a very high tolerance for canned laughter on TV. He has a steady diet of it night after night. AND, he has near-debilitating anxiety.

In Advertising, we learned about subliminal messages flashed on the screen, but what about in canned laughter ? Do you know of that being used by sponsors to induce particular behaviors ? For example, used to ramp up anxiety so that one reaches for a cigarette or an antidepressant ?

I challenged him to avoid shows that are rife with canned laughter and see if the anxiety is alleviated.

I've run out of ideas to help him. Clearly, I'm grasping for any answer.


Thanks

I do believe canned laughter can trigger severe cognitive dissonance, especially when it is constantly associated with things that are not really funny.

It could be regarded as a form of gaslighting.

"Hey, listen to all these people laughing at this. That means it's funny. If you don't think it's funny, there's something wrong with you. You're different. You're weird. You don't have a sense of humor. It's obviously funny because ... listen to all the people laughing."

Over time a sustained campaign of attaching canned laughter to certain types of behavior and speech can condition people into accepting those things as being funny and ridiculing people who don't find them funny as being prudes, squares, humorless and uptight. Things that previously would have been regarded as ghastly, unfunny and grotesque can be recategorized as nothing but good fun through a process of herd cues (e.g. constant replaying of a recording of laughter from a large audience).

Yeah, what he said!

I wanted to be a copywriter. It's hard to imagine that someone creative came up with the idea of canned laughter.

Sorry, but canned laughter went away a long time ago. Unless your relative is watching reruns of Gilligan's Island, Bewitched, Green Acres, etc. That's a real audience you're hearing.

Modern era multi-camera sitcoms like Seinfeld, Big Bang Theory, 2 Broke Girls are/were filmed in front of a live audience.

anonculus Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> Modern era multi-camera sitcoms like Seinfeld, Big
> Bang Theory, 2 Broke Girls are/were filmed in
> front of a live audience.


Why does it sound so artificial ?

In Seinfeld there was indeed a "live" audience. But laugh tracks could still be added in if the live audience response was too anemic to give the desired effect to the punchlines. Furthermore, Seinfeld's live audience was only there for the segments shot in studio with the standard show sets. When they did on-location outdoor scenes they added the laugh track in editing.

The difference between the old days is that they don't reuse the same sample repeatedly (which was a giveaway in early television). They can play with an infinite variety of laugh track samples.

Oh, sorry, EOD. For some reason, I thought you were an ad guy.

But, thank you for responding.

Wally, you couldn’t have explained it better.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/12/2019 02:19AM by kathleen.

There was an episode where Rob Petri and crew were told they had to include canned laughter in the script. They got into a big debate over the difference between a "chuckle" and and a "chortle."

"Now, that's a GUFFAW!"

It wouldn't if the prophet and his wife were filmed as Adam an Eve.

Now you've got me laughing. :D

Laughter is indeed the best medicine but it has to be the real deal.

Canned laughter does come with side effects and when used should come with a disclaimer like the ads on TV for prescription meds which have to stipulate that they may cause, headaches, dizziness, constipation and have caused death in some people.

You can't fool your subconsious. You can only make it crazy.

I asked my daughter if she’d seen my newspaper. She told me that newspapers are old school.
She said that people use tablets nowadays and handed me her iPad.

That fly didn’t stand a chance.

:D