If Life Had a Laff Track
by Mad Dog

   Don’t take it personally, they don’t think the studio audience is any smarter than you, the home viewer. If you’ve ever gone to the taping of a TV show you’ve seen the signs which light up and sitcom star wannabes who cue the audience when it’s time to laugh or applaud. God help us if we were left to our own devices. See, we get confused easily, like the audiences on late night talk shows where the latest trend is not to laugh at jokes, but rather to applaud them. “It’s not funny enough to laugh at, but we appreciate the fact that you’re helping the economy by keeping that writer off the unemployment lines, not to mention out from behind the counter at our local 7-11 where we’d have to watch him snap his jaws loudly every time we ask for a Big Bite.”

   Television is the only medium that uses laugh tracks. Movies don’t have them. Newspapers don’t tell you to [insert laugh here] when you read the comics page, though judging by most of them it wouldn’t be a bad idea. Humorous books don’t use laugh tracks, nor are they included with the books on tape versions. Audio guides in museums don’t have them either, not even when you find yourself standing in front of a canvas that looks remarkably like the drawings on your refrigerator which your artistically challenged 3-year-old niece did, probably because they assume that in this case you’ll have no problem supplying your own laughter.

   Aside from making life lighter, more fun, and more like the TV sitcom we all wish we were a part of, we’d feel much better knowing that we’re laughing at the right moments. After all, nothing’s more awkward than hearing someone say, “No, I’m serious” after you burst out laughing at the story of their grandmother becoming Chipmunk Chow after pilfering acorns from a tree in the back yard because Martha said the best wooden spoons came from oak you grew from scratch.

   The truth is, it’s not always easy to tell when people are trying to be funny. You can take a cue from those who laugh at their own jokes, except that’s a dead giveaway that they never say anything funny. Then there are those who are so deadpan you don’t know whether they’re kidding or not. They say something, then stare, daring you to laugh. You know that if you laugh they’ll ask what’s so funny because they were serious, yet if you don’t they‘ll say, “Hey, I’m kidding around, don’t you have a sense of humor?” This is what’s known as a no-win situation, much like being asked, “Does this make my butt look big?” or “Does my stomach poking out of the gaps between the buttons on my shirt remind you of Britney?” There are definitely times when being a deaf mute has its advantages.

   That’s why emoticons were invented. They’re the goofy symbols comprised of punctuation marks people pepper through their emails which are supposed to look like a smile, a frown, and Macaulay Culkin doing his Home Alone look, though no matter how you turn your head or tilt the monitor they still look like the cat’s been walking on the keyboard again. Emailing a laugh track as an attachment would be much more effective. It wouldn’t be so cutesy, would clue the person in as to whether you’re being sarcastic (groan), cute (awwww), clever (ohhhh!), or just a real laff riot. Best of all, a flood of email laugh tracks would clog up the Internet so much that there wouldn’t be enough bandwidth left for all that spam to get through to you.

   Hey, that was a joke. Hmmmmm…..come to think of it, maybe having laugh tracks in print isn’t such a bad idea after all. 

©2003 Mad Dog Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
These columns appear in better newspapers across the country. Read them and laugh, or we'll be forced to add a laff track.