CBS - GELBART FOUGHT AGAINST LAUGH TRACK

GELBART FOUGHT AGAINST LAUGH TRACK

In the end, Larry Gelbart was grateful that when M*A*S*H* was released on DVD, 20th Century Fox allowed viewers the option of watching it either with a laugh track or without. His remarks appeared Wednesday on Vanity Fair 's website, culled from Mike Sacks's 2008 interview with him for the book Here's the Kicker. Gelbart, who created the TV series based on Robert Altman's movie and was its principal writer for its first four years, said that he had fought CBS executives on the laugh track issue from the inception of the show. "If you've ever watched it without a laugh track, well, that's the show as we intended it to be watched. We did not mean for people to be cackling throughout the show; it becomes so much more cynical and heartbreaking without all that cheap, mechanical laughter." Gelbart's reaction to the laugh track at the time "Outrage. Anger. On a good day, mere frustration. It was a four-year battle that I lost over and over again. The one concession from the network was to permit us to never have the laugh track in any operating room scenes."

17/09/2009