- The Drew Gooden channel,
is filmed in front of a live studio audience.
(audience applauses)
Hi guys.
(audience laughing)
Its not that funny.
So you may know I'm not the biggest fan of laugh tracks.
A couple of years ago I made a video called,
Efficiency in Comedy,
where I not only complained about how
unnatural the sound of canned laughter feels
while watching a show,
but I also tested a theory I had had for a long time
which is that live tracks don't just grate my ears,
and make me roll my eyes,
but they also lessen the amount of jokes
you can fit in a show
by creating dead space in between lines.
So when I took an episode of Friends, for example,
and edit out all the segments where no one was talking,
because it was the audiences turned to make noise,
it worked out to be over five minutes long.
And when the entire episode is only like 21 minutes,
that means you're looking at about a quarter of it
having no substance at all.
And I know that comedy is not a race,
it's not about having the most jokes,
it's about having good jokes.
If the goal was just to fit as many jokes as you could
into like 10 seconds,
you would just say them all at the same time.
(indistinct chatter)
Something tells me that wouldn't work very well.
So that idea kept eating away at me
until I finally took on the experiment.
Two episodes of Friends,
two episodes of The Office,
one pen and paper,
three cups of coffee, one mental breakdown,
and a whole lot of pressing pause.
Once I was done,
I counted up all the jokes and was able to determine that,
yes in fact the show without laugh tracks
had more jokes per minute,
which means my hypothesis was correct.
And comedy is now objective, thanks to math.
Alright, goodnight everyone.
(end credit music)
Except not really, because I wasn't very thorough.
I chose two random episodes of two different shows
to try and prove my point.
And I don't think that was enough.
Every time I think back on that video,
I think about an idea that I was really excited to test
but I kind of half-assed my way into the conclusion
that I wanted to have from the beginning.
So, I decided to do this again but bigger.
Six different shows, three episodes per show,
12 cups of coffee,
and about seven hours of my life I'll never get back.
Here's how it went.
(upbeat instrumental music)
I didn't just wanna choose more shows this time.
I also wanted to try and pick different types of shows.
It's the same two categories as before,
but I feel like there's some differentiation
within each one.
So let's start with Parks and Rec'.
It wouldn't be fair to say that Parks and Rec'
is underrated,
but I do still feel like it's underappreciated
because it will forever be stuck in the shadow of its older,
more popular cousin.
Like The Office, Parks and Rec' was an NBC mockumentary
that has continued to thrive
due to its second life on Netflix.
Something I actually contribute partly to
reaction GIFs on the internet.
The characters in this show are so strong
that you can look at a silent moving image of
Ron Swanson without ever having watched an episode
and know exactly who he is.
And now you gotta know more about this guy,
so you might as well watch all 126 episodes,
add in a bunch of home run casting choices
and a perfectly satirized fictional town,
and you end up with one of the funnier shows
I've ever watched.
Because of the fast pace of Parks and Rec'
I expected to have the most jokes per episode
of any of the ones on the list, but we'll see.
I use two different random number generators
to pick the episodes I'll be watching,
which is what I'll be doing
for the rest of the shows as well.
Up next Malcolm in the Middle.
When I was like nine,
my parents came home one day
with season one of the show on DVD.
I didn't wanna watch it because for some reason
my dumb kid brain got this confused with
Miracle in Lane 2,
a Disney Channel Movie where Frankie Muniz,
rolls down a hill.
Luckily that's not what the DVD was,
and we did watch it, and I fell in love.
For the next few years,
I would rewatch these episodes over and over again,
wishing I could somehow watch the rest of the show
because I guess I was too stupid to realize
they were still airing it on TV.
I always thought my parents were lying
when they said they couldn't buy season two on DVD.
But years later I found out it was never released.
Turns out it would have cost Fox too much money
to pay for the music licenses from the show.
And so after the first season, they never even bothered.
Anyway, I watched season one when I was nine
and reruns of season two through seven in high school.
This show is so good.
Even in spite of the fact that one third of every episode
feels like a week distraction,
that's sometimes hard to get invested in.
Don't get me wrong,
I love Francis as a character,
and I loved when he would come home
and have interactions with the rest of the family.
But in some episodes, it's tempting to just fast forward
through whatever he's got going on.
I think the reason this show stands out so much
is because it wasn't about a perfect family
where things always work out,
it's about these realistic flawed characters who butt heads,
and end up in believably bad situations.
A lot of the time the humor comes from
how things don't work out,
even when it seemed like they would.
That being said,
I feel like Malcolm in the Middle, was more of a slow burn
rather than an onslaught of punchline.
So I'm curious to see how many jokes there are on here
compared to the rest of the shows.
The final single-camera show I'm including is,
Schitt's Creek.
The reason I'm choosing this one is because
I've never watched it.
I feel like if I only chose shows I loved
then I might come off as biased.
And the whole point of this is to try and do the opposite.
The only thing I know about Schitt's Creek is that
one time they paid me $500 to make a vine about it.
But then everyone who did want one had to post it
on the same day and it was a total disaster.
But hopefully this show is good.
It seems like a great cast.
So I have pretty high expectations.
Alright, moving onto multi-cams.
So let's start with the one that I think stands out
most on this list, The IT Crowd.
- Hello.
- Well, I guess it doesn't actually stand out that much.
It's just the only British show on here.
And that makes it different.
It's also probably the most conceptually simple
out of all the shows in here.
It's just three people who work in an IT department.
And sometimes they do things.
The season two premiere is probably my favorite episode
of any show ever.
The way the writers weaved each story together
so that every character's plot line builds individually,
but then they all collide at the end
in the most beautiful way.
It is art.
It's one of the rare times in my life
that I didn't actually mind the studio audience
laughing along and applauding at the end,
because it felt so earned.
I think the most memorable episodes of TV have this long,
slow crescendo from start to finish.
And The IT Crowd usually perfected that.
Up next, How I Met Your Mother,
How I Met Your Mother premiere around the time
when single-camera shows were starting to have more success.
And I think the general population was just about ready
to move on from the old format.
Because of that,
the show feels like it has a foot in the door of both.
It is technically a multi-camera sitcom,
but the laugh track is really quiet and not too intrusive.
It's like the studio audience is just whispering
in the corner.
Like, don't worry guys, we're still here,
but we're gonna keep it down.
I haven't watched the show since it first aired,
but I enjoyed it at the time.
They were definitely going for like a modern Friends vibe.
And I think they do a pretty good job.
Like every successful show,
the reason How I Met Your Mother worked so well,
is because the writing is good,
and the characters are very well cast.
I don't know if I'll enjoy it as much as I used to,
but I guess I'll find out.
Finally, The Big Bang Theory.
That's right baby,
I brought out the big guns.
What you thought I would make a video about laugh tracks
and not talk about the Smash Mouth of sitcoms.
You were dead wrong.
Often regarded as the pinnacle of both entertainment,
as well as humankind.
The Big Bang Theory is a show about nerd and hot girl
and how those things makes them different.
I'm actually kind of excited to watch a few episodes
of this show because it has so much law around it
at this point that I'm thinking
there's no way it lives up to its reputation.
Surely I'll laugh a few times, right?
Regardless of how I feel about the jokes,
so I'm anticipating quite a bit of them.
They might actually pull off an upset
considering how often the studio audience
starts going ape shit.
This is probably a good time to talk about,
The Scoring System real quick.
That was another thing I don't think I clarified well enough
when I did this originally.
I just started counting jokes all Willy-nilly
without ever defining what I viewed as a joke.
So for multi-cams, it's pretty straightforward.
If the audience laughs, a joke has been made.
Every once in a while something flies under the radar,
but my thought process is,
if a choice was made by the writers that was meant
to elicit a laugh it counts as a joke.
Sometimes lines have more than one joke in them
because of the way they're worded.
Sometimes a facial reaction or a body movement
counts as a joke.
It really just depends on the situation.
If it's a show without a laugh track,
I just try to imagine where the last would be inserted
if there was.
- I am voting for you.
(audience laughs)
- You're not voting for yourself?
(audience laughs)
- Leslie you can't vote for yourself, I don't think,
I'm pretty sure that's illegal.
(audience laughs)
- That's so funny.
Keep in mind if you don't like my scoring system,
you're more than welcome to try this out yourself.
All you have to do is, whip out a notebook
and take all the fun out of watching TV.
Best part of the video coming up.
I'm about to say a bunch of numbers.
So in Parks and Rec' first episode,
I counted 133 jokes in 21 minutes,
then 169 jokes in 27 minutes
and then 113 in 23 minutes.
I had to reroll for the last episode,
'cause I didn't realize at first
that the one I landed on initially
was twice as long as the usual episode,
and I don't got time for that.
Anyway, from those three episodes,
that's an average of 5.8 jokes per minute.
Malcolm in the Middle, actually had the best
out of any show.
It's just a testament to how well-written it is
that they're able to jam so many jokes in there
without you even realizing it sometimes.
So I counted 131 jokes, then 122, then 133,
all the episodes are 21 minutes,
that's 6.1 jokes per minute on average.
And in Schitt's Creek, kinda led me down
both numerically and also it just wasn't as funny
as I thought it would be.
It's very similar to Arrested Development plotwise.
It's a rich family who lost their fortune
and now has to adjust to normal life.
But were Arrested Development has this wide cast
of varying characters,
I feel like everybody in Schitt's Creek
is just kind of the same person.
Still pretty funny though.
I laughed a few times.
I liked the little visual gags here and there,
like them struggling with these giant menus
in the pilot episode.
But this one was the lowest out of the three.
I counted 111, 104, and then 112,
all the episodes are 21 minutes.
That's 5.2 jokes per minute.
If you then average those three numbers together,
that's about 5.7 jokes per minute
in the three single-camera shows that I watched.
So now the shows with a laugh track,
starting with It Crowd,
I counted 110 jokes in 23 minutes,
137 jokes in 24 minutes and then 106 jokes in 22 minutes.
How I Met Your Mother ended up being the slowest pace show
out of all of them.
I counted 93, then 100, then 103.
All the episodes are 21 minutes long.
So that's about 4.7 jokes for minute.
And then finally The Big Bang Theory, as I predicted before
did have a lot of jokes per episode.
I counted 92 in 18 minutes, 114 in 20 minutes,
and then 104 in 19 minutes.
So average of 5.4 jokes per minute.
Better than Schitt's Creek, at least in terms of volume,
but still not enough to bring the average of multi-cams up
works out to be about five jokes per minute.
So I guess all that time I spend watching these episodes
and smelling this sharpie
because I couldn't find a regular pen,
was not put to waste.
Because now it's slightly stronger statistical evidence
of what I tried to prove like two years ago.
I think my biggest takeaway though,
is that The Big Bang Theory does have a lot of jokes.
So I guess it's well written.
Alright, I gotta rant about this shit. Watch this scene.
(audience laughing)
- Water Demon.
(audience laughing)
- Ice Dragon.
(audience laughing)
- lesser Warlord of Ka'a
(audience laughing)
- That's four Laugh tracks and not a single joke was made.
I feel like so much of the show is just nerdy guy
is saying a science thing,
and it's funny because of how nerdy it sounds.
And look, I laughed a few times during the show.
It's not that all of the writing is terrible.
Here's a joke I thought was really funny.
- Beb, open up.
- I'm not talking to you.
- And who are you talking to?
(audience laughs)
- It's just the constant laughing at nothing
that drives me crazy.
And I think that's a big reason why people are so turned off
by laugh tracks.
They're so overused in shows like this,
that it's hard to trust what you're actually watching.
It's like, boy who cried laugh,
you keep telling me something funny happened
but I don't see it.
And then by the time something funny actually does happen,
I don't believe it.
The Big Bang Theory ran for 12 seasons.
And it was on the air for so long that by the time it ended,
TV culture had completely changed.
There seem to be way fewer sitcoms made like this anymore.
Hell even their spinoff show Young Sheldon,
is shot in a completely different format.
It's more narrative focused.
There's no studio audience.
It's actually insane to me that it spawned from this.
- Hey. I brought Chinese.
- And I brought Indian.
(audience laughing)
- Even without my weird dumb math exercise,
I think the general population has been subconsciously
catching onto this for a while,
and is just not as interested
in this kind of sitcoms anymore.
In fact when I think back to some of the funniest shows
that I've watched recently,
a lot of them aren't even like straightforward comedies.
Certain HBO shows like Barry and Silicon Valley.
They're super funny and they're filled with comedic actors,
but they also have this really compelling story
going under the background of all the GIFs.
Actually the hardest I think I've laughed at a show recently
is in Succession.
which is this insanely well-written series with plot twists
and these brutal backstabbing moments.
And then there's this randomly hilarious scene
with Greg and Tom that I can't play
or this video would get age restricted.
I think maybe where we as an audience have slowly shifted
over the past couple of decades.
I can't speak for everyone obviously
because everybody has their own individual tastes.
But for me,
there's something much more satisfying
about the juxtaposition of emotional depth
followed by jokes that break that tension.
Good punchlines are important,
but in order for you to actually care about what's going on,
you need to get invested in the characters and their lives.
Even in shows like Parks and Rec'
that have these relentlessly silly moments,
they'll sometimes follow those up
with a much more serious scene
to flesh out the characters on an emotional level.
Like watching this one episode,
I'm sitting here counting joke after joke, after joke,
and then all of a sudden,
there's a shift with the last minute or so,
there's hardly any joke.
Leslie wins the city council race that she's been on
for the entire season up until that point.
And so she gives this nice speech,
about how she couldn't have done it without the hard work
of all her friends.
They even have a great little detail in there
where they show the part where she starts going off script
and just speaking from the heart.
And it ends up being this really nice heartwarming moment
that grounds and otherwise absurd show.
And I think that's ultimately what keeps me coming back.
You wanna be invested in what's going on in the universe
because when you are,
all of the jokes are gonna hit harder.
To bring up Parks and Rec' one last time.
There's another really good scene in that episode,
where is having this conflicting moment
because she's fulfilling a lifelong dream,
but she also just found out her boyfriend might take a job
that puts him several hundred miles away.
You can feel the emotion on her face.
You can empathize with her.
And then Paul Rudd comes in to break the tension.
- Leslie, I can't figure this thing out.
Can you help me this?
- Yeah, just hang on a second Bobby.
- I've ink all over my hands
and the pen thingy came off the chain.
- And to me at least the most memorable shows
strike that perfect balance between funny
but also compelling.
There's always still gonna be a place
for more straightforward comedy shows
with constant shallow punchlines.
It really just depends on what mood you're in.
Sometimes you just wanna laugh at something dumb.
Sometimes you don't wanna watch a show
with emotional depth
'cause it's like, I got my own shit going on,
and now I gotta care about these fictional characters too.
It's interesting to me the way that television
has slowly shifted away from the traditional sitcom.
When you look at what's on TV right now,
CBS is really the only major network with shows
that still have laugh tracks in them.
The other thing I noticed a lot of these shows
have in common, its they almost all feature
an old random actor who's been around for a very long time.
Matt LeBlanc, Patricia Heaton, Cedric the Entertainer.
CBS's approach is so clearly like
we're gonna make shows with actors that you recognize
from other shows using the same format of those shows.
We realized their target demographic
is people who hate change,
and there's no point of trying to tailor
to this new generation of people,
who's gonna be more interested in Netflix and Tik TOK,
no matter what we do.
Laugh tracks are hanging on by a thread.
And I don't think it'll be much longer
before we look back on this era like,
hey, isn't that kinda weird that we used to do that.
But like a lot of things in life,
it made sense for a long time and then eventually it didn't.
People change, pop culture evolves, it's inevitable.
I don't know about you guys,
but the show Friends has taken on a brand new role
in my life,
in that the only time I watch it,
is when I'm trying to fall asleep.
There's something about the static predictable rhythm
of sitcom audio at a very low volume
that puts my mind at ease.
So I guess that's all I really have to say about this topic.
Though the other thing that drives me crazy about TV
is the constant breaks
every time you get invested in what's happening,
they cut to someone else who tries to sell your shit.
And I hate it...
The Drew Gooden channel will return
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and, or listen to me for about 10 to 20 minutes at a time.
Be sure to tune in next week
for a video where I do the same exact exercise
as I did in this one,
only instead of sitcoms, I go back and count all the jokes
in my own YouTube videos.
Not to spoil anything but I hear the number ends up being
so much lower than I was hoping,
that it makes me cry
and I quit making YouTube videos forever.
Alright. See you then.
(upbeat music)