Crankarm said:
The new FRRP came in for a lot of crtiticism on Points of View for the canned laughter. Apparently a mixture of canned and live studio laughter is used
No, that's not what they said, if I remember correctly. It is all real reactive laughter from a studio audience - some is scenes filmed in front of the audience, as in a play, and the bits that can't be done that way - location filming mainly, and special effects, are shown to the same audience on screens to get the laughter reaction. The laughter is all real, albeit sometimes a bit over the top due to them having been warmed up, etc... Canned laughter would be a tape of laughter added in whenever the editor thought it was needed - I think it's much more obviously fake.
TBH, I hadn't even noticed the laughter, maybe I'm just good at mentally editing it out.
I heard a story once from the good old days of radio. One technician came into a suite to find another editing tape. He would listen, then reel a great long chunk through, and cut it out, then listen again and so on, leaving minutes worth of tape on the floor. Asked what he was working on, he explained that it was the Goon Show, and he was cutting out the minutes of hysterical laughter after each gag. Leave it all in, and each episode would go on for hours... I don't know whether they collected it up and used it on less funny shows...