This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Valerie Trapp, an assistant editor who has written about the adult stuffed-animal revival, a fun way to pick up a new language, and the long tradition of villain comedy.

Valerie is a “self-appointed emissary” for Crazy, Stupid, Love, which she calls “the perfect rom-com.” She loves listening to Bad Bunny’s “unfailing bangers,” will watch anything Issa Rae does, and was left in a brief stupor after reading The Order of Time by the physicist Carlo Rovelli.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Gavin Newsom can’t help himself. Welcome to pricing hell. “Nostalgia for a dating experience they’ve never had”

The Culture Survey: Valerie Trapp

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: I’m still riding a wave of postconcert bliss from the Bad Bunny tour, which left me wanting little. But if I could, I’d love to see the Shakira, Maggie Rogers, and Jazmine Sullivan tours, and Steve Carell and William Jackson Harper in the Uncle Vanya production on Broadway.

Something I recently revisited: I’ve been rereading the civil-rights lawyer Valarie Kaur’s memoir See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love. It’s an absolutely gorgeous and lucid guide on how to stretch our heart a little past what we think is possible. Kaur defines the act of wonder as looking at the world—trees, stars, people you do and don’t like—and thinking, “You are a part of me I do not yet know.” I return to such phrases when I need a way forward.

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: The novel The Vulnerables, by Sigrid Nunez, entranced me with a voice I’d follow down any train of thought. And the physicist Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time left me walking around in a mild stupor for about 20 minutes, seeing buildings as events instead of as objects. Did I quickly forget all the physics Rovelli tried to teach me? I’d barely grasped it in the first place. But his poetic musings on how humans experience time and mortality have stayed with me. [Related: A new way to think about thinking]

Authors I will read anything by: Jia Tolentino, Maggie Nelson, Andrew Sean Greer, Joy Harjo, Michael Pollan.

My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: Maybe not a blockbuster, but I’ll mention it anyway, because I am its self-appointed emissary: Crazy, Stupid, Love is the perfect rom-com. It’s a Shakespearean comedy of errors with jokes about the Gap and many perfect uses of the word cuckold. Could we ask for more? As for an art film, I love Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers—Penélope Cruz is brilliant in it (and in pretty much everything she does).

An actor I would watch in anything: In college, I was fascinated by Margot Robbie’s “animal work” method-acting process, which involves studying and embodying different animals to shape the physicality of her roles. She prepared for I, Tonya by observing bulldogs and wild horses; for Babylon, she studied octopi and honey badgers! I had a philosophy professor in college who once made us do a similar exercise as homework. I ended up embodying a crow, and by this I mean I made a gigantic fool of myself by squawking in front of passersby. So props to Margot—I’m happy to sit that exercise out and watch her do it instead.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: A quiet song: “Rodeo Clown,” by Dijon. I’ll play the entirety of Dijon’s discography when I feel even a bit moody, and this song is the pinnacle of moodiness. It’s perfect and a little deranged, all soul and catharsis. “You’re missin’ out on some good, good lovin’!” Dijon wails, screeching and theatrical, shortly before an interlude of quiet sobs.

A loud song: “Safaera,” by Bad Bunny, Jowell & Randy, and Ñengo Flow. Bad Bunny makes unfailing bangers that switch up and crescendo, taking you on a complete and adequately tiring perreo journey. “Todo Tiene Su Hora,” by Juan Luis Guerra, also can get me both dancing and crying happy tears of wonder at the magic of the world. [Related: Bad Bunny overthrows the Grammys.]

A musical artist who means a lot to me: Beyoncé. She’s ecstatic and lavish in her artistry. I think sometimes about a moment in her documentary Life Is but a Dream in which she emphatically tells a crowd, “I’m gonna give you everything I have. I promise!” I find that kind of exuberant generosity very moving.

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: Recently, Sarah Zhang’s article about the life-changing effects of a cystic-fibrosis breakthrough and Ross Andersen’s story about our hypothetical contact with whale civilizations left me in absolute awe.

The last entertainment thing that made me cry: I might not be the best gauge for this question, because I cry easily and for most movies—including once during a viewing of Justin Bieber’s 2013 concert film. But recently: the song “2012,” by Saba. It feels like time travel and sounds like nostalgia. It was the sweeping post-chorus, which speaks to simpler days, that got me: “I had everything I needed, everything / ’Cause I had everyone I needed.”

An online creator that I’m a fan of: I’m a devoted reader of Heather Havrilesky’s Ask Polly Substack, which is consistently hilarious, comforting, and sharp.

A good recommendation I recently received: Young Miko’s new album, Att.—it’s a 46-minute-long party. I saved pretty much every track and especially loved “ID” and “Fuck TMZ.”

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: I started rewatching Insecure this year while doing my taxes. Dare I say, I almost had a nice time on TurboTax. The show’s pilot remains brilliant. The “Broken Pussy” rap remains hilarious. I will watch anything Issa Rae does. [Related: How Issa Rae built the world of Insecure]

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: I mutter lines from “The Story Wheel,” by Joy Harjo, like affirmations. Whenever I feel myself slipping into self-deprecation or pride, I recall: “None of us is above the other / In this story of forever. / Though we follow that red road home, / one behind another.”

The Week Ahead

Challengers, a film directed by Luca Guadagnino about a former tennis star turned coach, played by Zendaya, who is enmeshed in a love triangle with two pro players (in theaters Friday) The Jinx: Part Two, the second installment of the infamous true-crime docuseries, in which the real-estate heir Robert Durst seemingly confessed to murder (premieres today on HBO and Max) Funny Story, a book by Emily Henry about a woman whose life is upended when her fiancé leaves her for his childhood best friend (out Tuesday)

Essay

Getty

The Most Hated Sound on Television

By Jacob Stern

Viewers scorned the laugh track—prerecorded and live chortles alike—first for its deceptiveness and then for its condescension. They came to see it as artificial, cheesy, even insulting: You think we need you to tell us when to laugh? Larry Gelbart said he “always thought it cheapened” M*A*S*H. Larry David reportedly didn’t want it on Seinfeld but lost out to studio execs who did. The actor David Niven once called it “the single greatest affront to public intelligence I know of.” In 1999, Time judged the laugh track to be “one of the hundred worst ideas of the twentieth century.” And yet, it persisted. Until the early 2000s, nearly every TV comedy relied on one. Friends, Two and a Half Men, Everybody Loves Raymond, Drake & Josh—they all had laugh tracks.

Now the laugh track is as close to death as it’s ever been.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Taylor Swift is having quality-control issues. Eight cookbooks worth reading cover to cover The uncomfortable truth about child abuse in Hollywood The illogical relationship Americans have with animals Something weird is happening with Caesar salads. Short story: “The Vale of Cashmere” Is this the end for Bluey? Prestige TV’s new wave of difficult men Ken will never die.

Catch Up on The Atlantic

The Trump trial’s extraordinary opening Finding justice in Palestine Why did U.S. planes defend Israel but not Ukraine?

Photo Album

Theo Dagnaud, a member of a fire crew, scans the horizon during Canada’s recent summer of gigantic forest fires. (Charles-Frederick Ouellet)

Check out the winning entries of this year’s World Press Photo Contest, including images of the aftermath of an earthquake in Turkey, Canada’s scorching wildfire summer, and war in Gaza.

Explore all of our newsletters.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

When American viewers flipped open the July 2, 1966, edition of TV Guide, they were treated to a bombshell story. This was the first installment of a two-part series on “the most taboo topic in TV,” the industry’s “best-known and least-talked-about secret,” the “put-on of all time”: the laugh track.

At the time, almost every comedy on air was filmed live in front of a studio audience—or at least pretended to be. Pretty much all of the biggest shows  used a laugh track—The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres. Savvy viewers might have figured out that not all of the giggles and guffaws were real, but few people outside the industry understood the extent of the artifice. Even shows filmed live added some artificial laughs, sometimes to supplement the audience and sometimes because the laugh track sounded more authentic than the real thing. Behind the scenes, “Laff Boys” played their “Laff Boxes” like magic instruments, calling forth rounds of applause or squeals of delight with the press of a button.

Viewers scorned the laugh track—prerecorded and live chortles alike—first for its deceptiveness and then for its condescension. They came to see it as artificial, cheesy, even insulting: You think we need you to tell us when to laugh? Larry Gelbart said he “always thought it cheapened” M*A*S*H. Larry David reportedly didn’t want it on Seinfeld but lost out to studio execs who did. The actor David Niven once called it “the single greatest affront to public intelligence I know of.” In 1999, Time judged the laugh track to be “one of the hundred worst ideas of the twentieth century.” And yet, it persisted. Until the early 2000s, nearly every TV comedy relied on one. Friends, Two and a Half Men, Everybody Loves Raymond, Drake & Josh—they all had laugh tracks.

Now the laugh track is as close to death as it’s ever been. The Big Bang Theory, the last major laugh-track show, ended in 2019, and nothing has taken its place. Half of the live comedies on the big-four American TV networks still use laugh tracks, but half of those appear to be ending this year. More tellingly: Can you name a single one? The laugh-track haters had to wait more than 50 years, but finally, they can rejoice.

In a sense, TV episodes are just short movies beamed into your living room. But movies never used laugh tracks, not even in the early, silent days, when it would’ve been easy to layer the sounds of a delighted audience over Charlie Chaplin’s buffoonery. There was simply no need: Every movie had its own live audience right there in the theater, so why bother simulating one? Early TV shows were not so much short movies as radio shows acted out onstage. And because radio shows were recorded in front of a live studio audience for people tuning in at home, TV shows were too. The point of the laugh track was to re-create the communal experience you would have in person, Ron Simon, a curator of television and radio at the Paley Center for Media, told me. It was necessary, one production executive thought, “because TV viewers expect an audience to be there.”

Live-audience laughter had long been sweetened for radio and TV broadcasts, but around 1950, Bing Crosby’s radio show took things a step further, dispensing with the live audience altogether and adding in the laughs later. TV executives soon took a lesson out of Crosby’s book. With the creation of the Laff Box, in the early ’50s, canned laughs proliferated to the point that even shows without the slightest pretense of having been performed for a live studio audience used laugh tracks. Even The Flintstones and The Jetsons did. Some shows were still filmed in front of a real audience, but even they sometimes relied on canned laughs.

Not that the viewers warmed up to the laugh track. There remained a dissonance between viewers’ stated and demonstrated preferences: People railed against the laugh track, but they adored shows that used it. Every so often, the networks would try a show without a laugh track, but none of them lasted long. It’s nice to think that we’re above laugh tracks, that we don’t need them to know what’s funny, but “those social cues help you understand the meaning of comedy,” Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist at University College London who has studied laugh tracks, told me.

By the late 1980s, though, the dominance of the laugh track was starting to erode. Dramedies such as Hooperman and The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd got people accustomed to laughing without any cue, Simon told me, and in the early ’90s, shows such as Dream On and The Larry Sanders Show demonstrated the viability of the unsweetened sitcom. In 1998, a not-yet-famous Aaron Sorkin insisted to ABC executives that adding a laugh track would ruin his first-ever TV show, Sports Night. If he were forced to add one, he said, he’d “feel as if I’d put on an Armani tuxedo, tied my tie, snapped on my cufflinks, and the last thing I do before I leave the house is spray Cheez Whiz all over myself.” The show started out with a laugh track but scrapped it for Season 2.

The laugh track remained a force, though, even as the tides turned against it. In 2003, The New York Times wrote that “pretty much nobody likes laugh tracks, perhaps because they’re such obvious fig leafs for the embarrassment of weak punchlines, perhaps because they make us feel bossed and condescended to, perhaps because they dehumanize one of the most human actions imaginable.” At the time, Friends was the most popular comedy on TV.

Within a few years, though, a new breed of sitcoms was supplanting the old, first with the arrival of Arrested Development, then with The Office and 30 Rock, and a few years later with Parks and Recreation and Modern Family. Laugh-track shows were coming to seem not just condescending but also stiff and fusty. People began making videos in which they removed the laugh tracks from classic sitcoms to show that they weren’t actually funny. “Living in L.A., you sometimes hear coyotes eating cats, and to me, that’s the sound of a multi-cam laugh track,” Steve Levitan, one of the creators of Modern Family, said a few years into the show’s run. “I just can’t take it anymore.”

Last month, CBS green-lighted a new comedy about two young parents in Texas. It’s a spin-off of The Big Bang Theory and, like the original, will have a laugh track. In short, despite the repeated proclamations of its demise, the laugh track remains. You can still find shows that have it, both on TV and on streaming services, but there is an undead quality to it now. Bob Hearts Abishola, (probably) The Conners, and (probably) Extended Family are ending this year, likely to be replaced by more laugh-track-less shows. And many of those that remain are clear nostalgia plays, such as Netflix’s That ’90s Show, Paramount+’s Frasier revival, and CBS’s The Big Bang Theory spin-off.

Networks and streamers are going to keep swinging, and as long as they do, the laugh track will live on. The older audiences who grew up and spent most of their adult life watching classic laugh-track comedies are still around, and they watch more TV than any other age group. Plus, conventional sitcoms, when they really connect, are more lucrative than any other type of show. But the laugh track simply is not at the center of culture anymore. A laugh-track show hasn’t won the best-comedy Emmy in almost 20 years. If you could once flip through channels and hear laugh track after laugh track, now you can power up your smart TV; toggle among the top shows on Netflix, Hulu, Max, and Amazon Prime; and not hear a single audience reaction.

Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, compares the state of the laugh-track sitcom to that of a much older medium: the fresco. “You could still get people to respond to beautiful paintings like Michelangelo painted on the ceiling,” he told me. “It’s just that people aren’t painting that way anymore.” Tourists still come from across the world to see the Sistine Chapel, and millions of people still watch Seinfeld and Friends on streaming services. But they may never lay eyes on a new fresco—or get into a new laugh-track comedy.

That might seem like reason to rejoice. But the death of the laugh track is not—or at least not just—something to celebrate. For all the ire it incurred, for all the bad jokes it disguised, the laugh track was fundamentally about reproducing the experience of being part of an audience, and its decline is also the decline of communal viewership. The era of the family gathering around the living-room TV is over. We don’t all watch the same shows on the same networks, and whatever we watch, we watch on our own personal devices. We don’t go to theaters as often. The laugh track was never more than the illusion of community, but now even the illusion has lost its luster.

There was always something a little dark about the illusion. But there’s arguably something even darker about its loss of appeal. Whether they realized it or not, viewers found comfort in the pretense that they were part of an audience. Now we are content to laugh alone.