Laugh Tracks Are Comfort Food For TV Audiences

While Peak TV has led to comedies with as much cinematic ambition and real-world atmosphere as a prestige drama, old-school sitcoms that use laugh tracks are not just abundant — but popular.

Why It Hits: Laugh tracks being popular in the year 2025 may seem like a plot out of The Twilight Zone, but it’s somehow true in this timeline. As TV studios tighten their belts and try to program shows that can appeal to the widest audience, cheap-to-make sitcoms could become a hot ticket — especially if they’re backed by laugh tracks that make sure jokes are landing as broadly as possible.

Behind the Scenes: When was the last time that you watched a show with a laugh track that wasn’t a rewatch of a Friends or Seinfeld episode?

For most Americans, it’s probably pretty recent, per THR.

• There are currently more multi-cam comedies with a laugh track on broadcast than single-cam comedies with no laugh track — seven versus five.
• One of those is the Chuck Lorre show Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage, which is currently ranked in the Nielsen Top 5 for broadcast shows.
• And long-running, laugh-track-backed, multi-cam comedies like Friends and The Big Bang Theory are still generating massive ratings on streamers… especially compared to their single-cam original series.

Last Laugh: So, why do people still love laugh tracks? There’s reportedly a comfort to them, making people feel like they’re watching the show with others (we’re in a government-recognized loneliness epidemic after all). Additionally, laugh tracks have been proven to make jokes seem funnier — you laugh because others are laughing (whether that laughter comes from a live-studio audience or recordings of people who died decades ago).

Prediction: While people like the cozy feeling of a laugh track, others may be drawn to them for how unnatural they are… so expect a new hit comedy to come out with an innovative use of the feature.