M*A*S*H Laugh Track

I loved the TV series M*A*S*H as a kid and had seen every episode many times. It's been a while, but I think I could still tell you Captain Tuttle's biography (ok I tried and got all but his weight right).

Saturday night a friend mentioned in conversation that M*A*S*H didn't have a laugh track during the OR scenes. I wasn't sure if that was true or not.

So I found this entry on M*A*S*H at the Museum of Braodcast Communications. "The series also made innovative uses of the laugh track. In early seasons, the laugh track was employed during the entire episode. As the series developed, the laugh track was removed from scenes that occurred in the operating room. In a few episodes, the laugh track was removed entirely, another departure from sitcom conventions."

I knew about episodes that didn't have any laugh track (like the realtime one) and those that turned it off for serious things (when Henry died), but didn't realize the shift in the series seasons.

Interestingly, while I use Wikipedia all the time, I didn't bother looking at wikipedia because in this case I didn't think it would be authoritative. Hmmm....