Garfield Minus Garfield

Obligatory tangent of Friends without the laugh track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgKgXehYnnw

Similarly creep and unsettling.

MASH is available without the laugh track.

Really changes the tone, though in that case it doesn't ruin it, just makes it different.

They filmed in front of a live audience in a theater and those are real people laughing. It's unsettling because the actors pause between lines until the laughter stops.

Reflexive dismissals of shows with laugh tracks are lazy.

To each their own! When I watch Ross ask how to beat up a woman in the street with eyes bugging out of his head there's a pretty big difference between a laugh track and no laugh track. Just like Garfield comics hit very different when you realize that John is actually talking to himself.

I don't "reflexively dismiss" all shows with a laugh track. Some of Friends is genuinely hilarious. But a lot of it is only funny, to me, when surrounded by others laughing.

Alan Alda has mentioned in interviews that he prefers it that way.

I feel like removing it removes some noise, but doesn't affect the tone. Story is, the MASH showrunners didn't want a laugh track, but the network insisted, so they used the lowest-fidelity one they could get away with.

Thankfully it was broadcast in the UK without the laugh track.

Obviously it still wasn't as darkly observant as the movie, but it did have a edge.