People on Reddit used to always share that clip of friends without the laugh track to show it wasn’t funny, so I’m assuming you’re referring to that. Honestly, it’s a completely dishonest representation of the show, and I say that as somebody who doesn’t particularly care for it. It’s a cultural touchstone, it’s a funny snapshot of a very specific time period, but a lot of the humor has aged like milk and even in its prime I found it too shlocky.
All that being said: The jokes are written with the laugh track in mind. The writers are not all hacks, you have simply removed a element of the joke that they are expecting to be there. That’s just as bad as pulling all character reactions when somebody says something in a show. The audience is represented by the laugh track and it’s a cue, but again, it’s expected. Then someone pulls it from a random scene and goes “see it’s trash!”
Call it lazy, call it trite, whatever, but if you remove the laugh track from any show that features one then it will 99% of the time suddenly stop being funny. It would be like removing Ron Howard’s narration from arrested development and pointing out how everybody just stands around randomly for a few seconds.
People on Reddit used to always share that clip of friends without the laugh track to show it wasn’t funny, so I’m assuming you’re referring to that. Honestly, it’s a completely dishonest representation of the show, and I say that as somebody who doesn’t particularly care for it. It’s a cultural touchstone, it’s a funny snapshot of a very specific time period, but a lot of the humor has aged like milk and even in its prime I found it too shlocky.
All that being said: The jokes are written with the laugh track in mind. The writers are not all hacks, you have simply removed a element of the joke that they are expecting to be there. That’s just as bad as pulling all character reactions when somebody says something in a show. The audience is represented by the laugh track and it’s a cue, but again, it’s expected. Then someone pulls it from a random scene and goes “see it’s trash!”
Call it lazy, call it trite, whatever, but if you remove the laugh track from any show that features one then it will 99% of the time suddenly stop being funny. It would be like removing Ron Howard’s narration from arrested development and pointing out how everybody just stands around randomly for a few seconds.