I’m sure everyone has already seen the music video for A-Ha’s Take On Me with new lyrics about the music video itself.  And you should have – it’s hilarious.  If you saw it when it was linked to by Jason Kottke over at his excellent site, you probably also listened to DaVinci’s Notebook’s Title of the Song, perhaps the most hysterically funny piece of meta I’ve seen this year.  In this particular “video”, it’s also accompanied by the uproarious laughter and occasional interjections of some people that were watching it performed.  Possibly radio show hosts?  I’m not sure, but in any case, I felt that it really added something!  And then, besides laughing at the person who professed in the comments that they didn’t get it, I noticed that a couple of commenters absolutely hated the laughing.

Now, don’t get me wrong:  I understand completely the yearning for a pristine track.  However, I’ve always foudn that the honest laughter of people really enjoying something invariably improves my own enjoyment.  Three examples, in chronological order:

As a child, I fell in love with the Sondheim musical “Into the Woods.”  If you haven’t seen it, it’s highly recommended.  Obviously live is best, but there’s a fantastic recording of a performance featuring Bernadette Peters as The Witch and Joanna Gleason as the Baker’s Wife.  We had taped this video off of PBS at some point (Don’t worry, anti-pirate crusaders, I purchased it long ago, and am looking to acquire the DVD version sometime soon), and I watched it with alarming frequency.  And my favourite part of the whole show was when the Baker’s Wife has acquired one of the magic items that is needed to lift the curse, and gets to tell her husband by way of the exchange (heavily paraphrased):

Baker:  We have just one midnight left and only two items found.

Baker’s Wife: Three.

Baker: Two.

Baker’s Wife: Three.  Compare this to your corn.

Okay, granted that line doesn’t make a lot of sense if you haven’t seen the show.  But trust me, it’s good stuff in context.  And at this point there is on the tape a gleeful chuckle extremely close to the mic.  Keep in mind, this has been taped live, so we’ve been hearing the audience laughing this whole time.  But this laugh is right against us, and I’ve always believed it to be the delighted chortle of the cameraman, who has probably seen this show countless times, but just loves this little reveal so much and has anticipated it’s coming for the entirety of the performance.  I still look forward to his laugh every time I watch that video.

Another example: in my first year of university, Sarah and I had a lovely day out, ending with seeing The Ring. I was too afraid and had to leave after about 10 minutes, so I just wandered into another theatre at random. They were showing My Big Fat Greek Wedding.  Now, I have really no strong feelings one way or another about romantic comedies.  Mostly I find them uninspired, but rarely actively unpleasant.  I don’t spend money on seeing them, but I’ve been known to watch them when the opportunity was offered.  So I had no expectations for this movie.  But the theatre was entirely filled with middle aged women in groups, seemingly an entire theatre filled with “girl’s night out” attendees.  And these ladies LOVED this movie.  They oohed and aahed and roared with laughter, and I got caught right up with them.  To this day, I like watching that movie, because the memory makes me smile.

Lastly: Rifftrax.  Now, if you’re not yet familiar with Rifftrax, then I must also assume you are not familiar with Mystery Science Theatre 3000.  If this is true of you, then go to rifftrax.com right now and listen to some of their free samples.  That will give you some idea of the fantastic idea that is riffing. And I love Michael J Nelson.  Heck, I’ve read one of his novels (Death Rat.  Very funny, but not as funny as MST3k and Rifftrax).  But when Des and I tried to watch the Rifftrax just with him… well, we got bored.  It was missing something.  It was missing the sense of comraderie. That comraderie is really what makes MST3k and the multiple person riffs shine.  Listening to them laugh delightedly at themselves and play off one another.  It’s ideal.

After this, I feel compelled to note that of course I hate laugh tracks in sitcoms and et cetera.  Of course, mostly I hate sitcoms, but even when they’re good, the laugh tracks feel forced and fake and entirely too expected.  The sense of people enjoying the show and of unexpected laughter is lost completely with canned laughter.  But this made me think of something interesting I just learned from a book I’m reading: A.J. Jacobs’ The Know-It-All in which A.J. reads the encyclopedia.  He tells us about claques, which were essentially a hired group of plants placed in the audience of 19th century French theatre.  And it wasn’t just for laughing uproariously to get the crowd going, though that was the speciality of the rieurs.  But there was more:  bisseurs who specialized in shouting for encores, commissaires who would elbow their neighbours exclaiming “This part is great!” and les pleureuses, who were women who specialized in sobbing at tragedies.  These claques were actually paid monthly by the actors in the play.

Neat, eh?

Tags: Books, Facts, Links, Recommendations
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