The reason I didn't like studio audiences for such a long time was that I didn't like being told when to laugh, which is how it felt most of the time. I still don't like being told 'that's funny, laugh at the funny thing,' especially since some jokes just aren't funny to me, even if they are to others. So the studio audience can pose a few problems in this respect. But I noticed something very weird about studio audiences, something which reminds me of the social experiment No Soap, Radio, in which you tell a joke, the punchline of which is a total non sequitur such as 'no soap, radio' that has nothing to do with the rest of the joke, tell some friends beforehand to laugh at the nonsensical joke, and see if others laugh too. Often the person's subconscious will create a meaning for the joke and make the person laugh, or else they will simply laugh to feel as though they aren't out of the loop, because other people are laughing. The use of a studio audience creates a similar effect; the studio audience laughs, therefore you realise something apparently funny has transpired. So even if you don't get the joke, you might still laugh because either you feel you should, or your brain makes some kind of connection between the event on screen and the laughing response.
Back to the problems studio audiences can create. I found myself watching an episode of Two and a Half Men (my opinion on this show is biased because I am a woman and I have self-respect) and I really listened to every line carefully, analysing it on a basic level while I watched, and very often I found myself thinking, after the studio audience laughed, that a line just wasn't funny. Sometimes 'funny' lines came across as just hateful. And yet the studio audience still laughed, and so did some viewers at home. This is something I find quite troubling, because the show comes across to me as intolerant and narrow-minded about basically anything outside the apparent norm of macho heterosexuality, and its use of the studio audience 'tricks' viewers into laughing at something frankly damaging or offensive, if you'll excuse my dramatic phrasing. It's not all bad though; sometimes it's just a form of corner-cutting for writers. For example, some shows use a studio audience to make viewers believe a joke has been told when in reality it hasn't. Although I like The Big Bang Theory it is a serious offender of this. A trend on YouTube has popped up, where clips of sitcoms are posted with the laugh track taken out, and doing so with The Big Bang Theory makes it easier to pick out when a lengthy scientific explanation, or simply the mention of geek pop culture, has been disguised as a joke.
Try it out next time you're watching a sitcom with a studio audience; really listen to the lines being spoken, and see which ones you genuinely find funny, and which you simply laughed at because you wanted to conform, if only on a subconscious level. In the end, we can't help laughing at something we don't understand from time to time; we're social creatures, and apparently that's what laughter is: a social communication. Think about that the next time you snort milk from your nose after your friend does his Michael McIntyre impression.
