Pre-Cooked audience laughter?

History generally gives credit to Lucille Ball for the notion of a live studio audience. Comedy performers have often struggled to move their act away from a live environment. The Marx Brothers used to test material on the road before committing it to film – not just to replace weaker gags with more reliable ones, but also for timing, so they could leave a suitable pause and not have the next set-up line drowned out by gales of laughter.

But I Love Lucy was certainly one of the first, if not the first television sitcom to be shot in front of an audience, and you can feel the crackle in the air as a zinger flies or Lucy attempts some ludicrous physical stunt. And yet, at some point in the 1990s, we just collectively decided that laugh tracks were old-fashioned at best and embarrassing or patronising at worst. “I don’t need canned laughter to tell me what’s funny.”

This lead to a very productive trend – again particularly in America – of shows like Brooklyn Nine Nine in which the sheer density of jokes would make pausing for laughter utterly impossible. But as usual, when you gain in one area you lose in another. Watching Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in Not Only But Also with Abigoliah as part of All British Comedy Explained, I’m struck by how big a part the audience played.

For many sketches, notably the so-called Dagenham Dialogues, the two men would only briefly rough out the shape of the routine, trusting that their improvisatory powers would carry the day. There would be no retakes, no pick-ups and no second chances. This wasn’t going out live, and we were (just about) past the point where editing of videotape was next-to impossible, but the interplay between the stars and the live audience was a huge part of transmitting their appeal into people’s homes.

There’s an undeniable pleasure in seeing a brilliantly rehearsed routine executed flawlessly. But there’s also a secret pleasure in seeing something go wrong, and maybe the most delightful sight of all is a genius performer teetering on the brink of failure and snatching a victory. Thus when during rehearsals Peter Cook withholds a particularly devastating line from his comedy partner, only to spring it on him when the audience is there and the camera are rolling, this isn’t malice. It’s a calculated technique designed to get the very best result. He’s capturing comedy lightning in a bottle.

All right, it may also have been malice – he was a complicated man. But let’s leave the psychoanalysis to another day.

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