Canned Laughter Lives! The Ghost of the Laugh Track Survives Online (Columns) (Newsbusted) (Column‪)‬

NEWSBUSTED, A THREE-minute comedy news show that appears on the Internet, doesn't have a fancy set like The Daily Show or The Colbert Report. Nor does it boast an Emmy-winning staff of writers, a stream of high-profile guests, or branded coffee cups. There's no room for an audience either: NewsBusted appears to be shot in a closet at the Media Research Center, the conservative nonprofit that produces the show. But when host Jodi Miller cracks one-liners about senior citizen stimulus giveaways or Mike Huckabee's presidential chances in 2012, a chorus of hoots and guffaws erupts just the same. That the laugh track has fallen into the hands of upstart outsiders is the sort of irony that deserves a mechanical chuckle of its own. For most of its 60-year life, the eternally jovial chorus that graced so many of America's favorite sitcoms has been portrayed as a tool of monopolist coercion, favored by heavy-handed network executives attempting to orchestrate our responses to their force-fed fare. "Canned laughter is the lowest form of fascism" Paul Krassner opined in a 1990 issue of The Realist. "It is propaganda that falsely--almost subliminally--implies something is funny when it isn't.... It is TV's ultimate insult to the audience."