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On Whitney Cummings Defends the Laugh Track of Whitney
@Charles Bogle All fair points (though "Norm" was a pretty funny show at times and Norm's lack of acting ability makes him unsuited for single-camera) but the other side of that, also from the AV Club interview: "Even the single-camera-style of shooting TV now, for me, is not as enjoyable as being in front of an audience.... Yeah, I got to do a sitcom like that for a year. It did not last, but it was so much fun. You spend most of the week working with the cast members, and you become this tight-knit little family, and that’s a really a great experience." - Paul F. Tompkins http://www.avclub.com/twincities/articles/paul-f-tompkins,55732/ I think there should just be room for both.
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On Whitney Cummings Defends the Laugh Track of Whitney
@Megh Wright Ah, but that's the difference between a laugh track and a studio audience. A laugh track -- or the constant music that "30 Rock" uses in lieu of a laugh track -- is the creator telling us when to laugh. An audience is real people telling the writers and performers that they found something funny. It's a different way of making sitcoms: at its best, it leads to sharper writing and performances, at its worst, it leads to dumbing down jokes to please a crowd. But it's not about telling us when to laugh. If they wanted to tell us when to laugh, they'd shoot without an audience and use laugh tracks.
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On Whitney Cummings Defends the Laugh Track of Whitney
@Megh Wright That's fair. I don't personally see how it is archaic (particularly since a show like "Community" or "30 Rock" cues us when to laugh constantly, through music and editing choices, whereas a live audience forces the writers not to just tell the home viewer when to laugh), but I get that the live-audience sitcom is not for everyone; we all have forms and formats we don't personally care for. But if live-audience sitcom wasn't an artistic choice, then the multi-camera format would never have been invented; most early filmed TV sitcoms were single-camera with laugh tracks.
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On Whitney Cummings Defends the Laugh Track of Whitney
@Megh Wright I think there's a difference between saying you personally don't like something, which is fine, and saying that something is artistically bad - which you weren't saying, but which many people do say about sitcoms with audiences. We wouldn't think it made sense for someone to say a show must not be funny because it _doesn't_ have laughter on the soundtrack, but it's become strangely common for critics to say that a show _with_ a laughing audience is doing something wrong. When in fact it's just a legitimate artistic choice that sketch shows, talk shows, and yes, sitcoms make all the time. We're all free to like or dislike what we want, but dismissing live audience laughter leads to ridiculousness like the time a New York Times critic said that "multicamera sitcoms are bad, and single-camera ones are good." So I would say that bad jokes, stories, performances are the show's problem; if we don't like the chosen format it's more our problem.
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On Whitney Cummings Defends the Laugh Track of Whitney
@Megh Wright But I think that's part of Cummings' point - her sitcom is an extension of her standup act, so it makes sense to have a live audience there to maintain that kind of rhythm and timing. Her show may turn out to be good or bad (though the jokes are no worse than in NBC's other comedy trailers, but who knows from trailers?), but the criticism she's getting is that it must be bad because there's an audience laughing or because it doesn't look like a movie. And she's right to be annoyed about that, since that has nothing to do with the quality of the show.
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On Whitney Cummings Defends the Laugh Track of Whitney
@HerooftheBeach: It's true that audiences are warmed up to laugh, but it's also true that lame jokes die in front of them all the time. When that happens, the writers substitute a new joke or the actors play it differently. So the final version we see on the air has used the audience for feedback to weed out the worst jokes, much as Judd Apatow's movies use constant test screenings in front of audiences to decide what jokes stay in and which ones go out. A show like "Modern Family" isn't as sharply-written as the same writers' work on "Frasier" in part because the writers don't have the same kind of pressure to change lukewarm jokes. @GothamTommy - I don't know what your point is exactly; the fact that Batman & Robin performed under expectations could demonstrate that the general public had better taste in 1997 than it does now. Certainly the best sitcoms of the '90s, whether with an audience (Seinfeld, NewsRadio) or without (Larry Sanders) match or surpass today's comedies, and you'd think some writers who celebrate the greatness of "Seinfeld" or "Cheers" would want to do a show in the format that made "Seinfeld" and "Cheers" the shows that they were. Besides, never forget that Gilligan's Island, The Flying Nun and The Brady Bunch and many more are single-camera sitcoms without audiences. If we took away the laugh tracks from those shows, would they be considered advanced and modern? Probably. But if culture has changed (and the continued success of multi-cam comedies suggests it hasn't) it's just changed by going back to the format Community shares with My Three Sons.
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On In Defense of the Multi-Camera Sitcom
davidfostercomedyblog: Well, now, I wouldn't say that (to use a catchphrase from a radio sitcom, still another kind of sitcom entirely). It is true that single-camera has some relationship to current entertainment, but it's the fact that movies and even reality shows have been more vital recently than some of the forms that multi-camera tries to mimic, such as live theatre. As for performances, it cuts both ways. Multi-camera is more unforgiving of an actor's flaws. But that can be a good or bad thing depending on the actor. "Lucky Louie" sort of highlighted Louis CK's flaws as an actor while the single-camera style on "Louie" allows him to emphasize what he can do as an actor, not what he can't. Anyway, my feeling is both styles have their advantages and neither should be dismissed.
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On In Defense of the Multi-Camera Sitcom
Caroline: Yes, NewsRadio is a great one, unquestionably -- and it was Paul Simms wanting to create a live audience sitcom after working successfully on one of the great single-camera sitcoms, "Larry Sanders." But a scene like this would just not be the same without Dave Foley bouncing off the audience. Sous Chef Gerard: NBC and ABC both ordered about the same split of multi/single last year, but wound up picking up almost all single-camera, so it's hard to know what they plan to do this year.
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On ABC's Best in Film and the Trouble with "Authoritative" Lists
By definition a list of 100 Best Comedies of all time that contains nothing older than 1974 (i.e. the College Humor list) is a terrible list. Not that all the best comedies are old, but some of them are. The College Humor list just proves democracy doesn't work. Or that it's a problem that we don't get exposed to old movies as kids (not that this is a "these kids today" thing; the same thing was happening when I was a kid). I find it interesting that two of the ABC top 5, Airplane! and Young Frankenstein, are basically deadpan parodies of older, serious movies. Airplane! is literally the script of an old black-and-white movie with jokes added. Maybe that kind of comedy, basically playing a story straight but subverting it, is particularly resonant today.
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On Why Whitney is the Best New Network Sitcom of 2011-2012
I agree that Whitney has gotten better, and Chris D'Elia's Alex has been one of the best performances on TV this year (his drunk scene was just a great bit of classical sitcom performance). Among NBC's new shows I'd put it above "Up All Night" too, and it doesn't deserve the hate it got for its format, but I think ABC's "Suburgatory" and even "Last Man Standing" have fewer obvious weaknesses.