Basic Trope: A recorded laughter is played after a joke is said or done.
- Straight: In 'The Alice & Bob Show', jokes are followed by a laugh track.
- Exaggerated: Every line told by the characters receives uproarious laughter.
- Downplayed: The laughter is very subtle, even for genuinely hilarious jokes.
- Justified: The laughter comes from an in-universe audience.
- Inverted:
- Whenever someone tells a joke, a crying track is played.
- Someone is graphically shown to crudely amputate a limb or kick the bucket. A laugh track plays.
- Alternately: Cricket track.
- Alternatively, Alice and Bob laugh out loud followed by a joke track.
- Alternatively, when a joke is made, a track of the audience crying out Dude, Not Funny! plays.
- Subverted:
- There is a laugh track - which goes suddenly silent after the joke goes too far.
- The joke is used too often, prompting someone to interrupt it.
- The show has nearly precise laughter after every joke, and there wasn't a "filmed before a live studio audience" disclaimer to tell you if there was... only for the last shot of the episode to pan to the Studio Audience that was there for the recording.
- Double Subverted:
- As the joke Crosses the Line Twice, the laughter cautiously starts up again.
- The audience finds the interruption funny and laughs.
- The end of the next episode uses the same recording of the studio audience from last time, turning them into Stock Footage by proxy.
- Parodied:
- The laugh track plays when no joke has been made, and a character lampshades the mistake.
- Whenever a laugh track plays, all the extras stop what they're doing and laugh, then continue like nothing had happened. In scenes with no extras, they pop in out of nowhere to laugh and vanish just as quickly. The protagonists are baffled.
- Zig Zagged: When a joke is played, the audience doesn't laugh, but on another joke, they do laugh.
- Averted: No laugh track is used in the show.
- Enforced: "All the other comedies on the network have one. How will the viewers know when you're being funny otherwise?"
- Lampshaded: "Ah, a laugh track. How droll."
- Invoked: The comedian brings a tape player with a laugh track onto the stage.
- Exploited: The local Sitcom Arch-Nemesis makes a whole bunch of jokes to trigger the laugh track and annoy their rival with the laughter.
- Defied: A character tells the audience to shut up.
- Discussed: "If this were a sitcom, we’d start hearing laughter right about now."
- Conversed: "Why do sitcom producers insert prerecorded laughs in their shows?"
- Deconstructed: The character is an insecure comedian who has to pay people to laugh at his jokes.
- Reconstructed: His laugh track actually works in encouraging a genuine reaction.
Back to Laugh Track, but don't let the bed bugs bite.(HAHAHAHAHA!).
