for 7 July 1999. Updated every WEEKDAY.

I enjoyed your acidic article
on armband accessories. But
it does you no credit to
criticize Michael Moore for
sporting a bit of extra
paunch; that's pretty petty
considering all the cool
stuff he's done. It's like
(though perhaps less extreme
than) making fun of Stephen
Hawking's inability to run
the marathon.

Mark Ambachtsheer
<marka@algorithmics.com>

Don't miss the obvious: Being
jealous of Mike's many
successes and unable to
compete artistically, I
chose instead to attack via
the soft underbelly. The pettier
the better. Great idea about
my favorite mush-mouthed
Poindexter Stephen "E = mc²
mmmmphhhuhhgghhhh" Hawking:
Mind if I steal it?

Chris Kassel

"... an emotional roller coaster
ride ..."

I wish it were all true. (You
did make that up, right?)

Thanks,

Carl Pelletier
<cpelletier@softsysteme.com>

So a little artistic license
was taken here and there:
Rushdie's inscription was
actually in Aramaic not
Farsi; Camille's notebook was
Dior not Versolato; and the
runway explosion was caused
by Jackie Chan's brain
exploding as he attempted to
pronounce the letter r. Oh,
and the celebrity names were
impersonations.

Chris Kassel

Sucksters:

It's a little odd that Suck
would declare Mark Leyner on
his way out in '98 and then
turn around and publish
"Dateline: Fashion Front '99"
— a column that seems,
IMHO, to owe so much to Tooth
Imprints on a Corndog, et al.
Is journalistic absurdism on
its way back in, or are you
being fashionably unhip?

And just what color armband
would I wear to support it?

Ryan Scharer
<rscharer@mail.wesleyan.edu>

Don't know what today's piece
reminded you of, but we stand
by our Leyner deathwatch. Did
you see his new piece in Joe
mag? There's a guy who
desperately needs a laugh
track.

Yr pal,

BarTel

Hans,

I looked at your "Canned
Heat" in today's Suck and I
wanted to address some of the
points you made.

I found your notion that "the
mechanized and tittering
swells of an automated laugh
track ... should be
considered one of the few
remaining signs that
producers of TV shows still
give a crap about their
audiences" completely
reasonable. On the other
hand, have you considered the
possibility that the growing
number of non-laugh-
tracked shows indicates that
producers are attempting to
respond to other needs
of the viewing public?
There is a substantial
number of people who
gravitate to shows like
Sports Night and Ally McBeal
because they've decided they
can decide what they find
funny and they don't need a
laugh track to do it for
them. And some people enjoy
both approaches; ratings
posted toward the end of the
season seemed to indicate
that Sports Night had started
to build on the audience
for the show before it, the
laugh-track-driven Spin
City.

You mention the alienating
effect of the absence of a
laugh track, but in my
experience, the presence of a
laugh track can be just as
disturbing. How many unfunny
sitcoms have you sat through
with stupid joke piled upon
stupid joke, while your
frustration grew at the
inverse proportion between
the lame humor and the
enthusiastic response of the
live/canned audience? For
every hopeless individual
saved from suicide by a laugh
track there's another driven
closer to it by the same
thing, alienated from the
canned audience by differing
tastes.

Seinfeld would not have
survived without a laugh
track. It wouldn't have made
sense without it since at the
beginning of every episode,
the comic-audience rapport
set the stage for the
episode. On top of that,
you need that illusory
audience anchor when you're
making a comedy "about
nothing." On the other hand,
The Simpsons has lasted even
longer than Seinfeld,
entering distinctly crazier
territory with jokes that not
every audience member is
going to get. It has never
had a laugh track and doesn't
need one. It wouldn't work
with the cartoon format, and
anyway, the show functions on
enough levels (family comedy,
wicked satire, cultural
odyssey) to keep an audience
engaged.

For some shows, the laugh
track enables the viewers to
feel part of a communal
audience. For others, the
absence of a laugh track
enables the viewers to become
emotionally involved with the
characters on screen. And I
imagine there are quite a few
people in rural counties,
watching Ally McBeal
and The Practice every
week, caught up in each show
even though their lives aren't
represented on screen.

Some shows are enhanced by a
laugh track. Others are
limited by it (Sports Night
used one for about half of
its first season, found it
jarred with the show's
comedic/dramatic agenda, and
dropped it — and the show
substantially improved).
There's plenty of room for
both kinds of shows (and
still other alternatives, as
well).

It would be truly disastrous
if all media were as
conservative and
unadventurous as you seem to
wish television to be. For
example, if journalists were
only able to address topics
with a stiffly formalized
approach at the expense of
satire (or even simple
irreverence), it would
alienate a substantial
proportion of the news
audience.

And there sure as hell
wouldn't be a Suck.

Thank you for your attention.

Sincerely,

David Robson
<drobson@yerbabuenaarts.org>

Your point about audiences is
well taken. But you
underestimate the dangers of
innovation. We Americans just
aren't ready for our own
decisions, as Gouverneur
Morris of New York wrote in
the 18th century: "The mob
begin to think and reason.
Poor reptiles! They bask in
the sun and ere noon they
will bite, depend upon it."
An inegalitarian attitude, to
be sure. But more so than
Ally McBeal? Still, we
believe the children are our
future, and perhaps they can
live up to the promise of
uncanned laughter. (That is,
as long as journalists aren't
constrained by a stiffly
formalized style — now
that would be a problem.)

Yours,
Moleman

Hans,

"What it makes you is
un-American, hostile to a
tradition that a half-century
of audiences have voted for
with both real and
manufactured applause."

Are you trying to be ironic
or satirical with that
statement about canned
laughter, or is one of the
Big Four (or the three
little) networks paying you a
nice little residual for your
obfuscating pile of shit?

Simply put, manufactured
applause, as you've put it,
also constitutes manufactured
consensus (no, I won't delve
into Chomsky land, but it
does draw interesting
parallels with other forms of
manufacturing consent).
Personally, I don't like
Sports Night either, but I
don't need to have the
silence broken to entice me
to laugh. Maybe you do.

Maybe it has to do with the
collective shortening of our
attention span — we can't
wait around to get the joke
so the canned laughter is our
cue. Very Pavlovian, I might
add.

I'm sure you've got a clever
put-down/comeback to counter
my rant — after all, you
gotta keep the hits coming.

Very American, by the way.
And very wrong.

Nelson Tremblay
<nellie83@hotmail.com>
Sault Ste. Marie, ON

I gather from your letter
that you are Canadian. The
open-spirited mirth and
guileless character of your
people must make our canned
laughter seem like a very
foreign and exotic thing
indeed. I hope one day to use
my network residuals to visit
Canada's beautiful lakes and
mountains. Thanks for
writing. With fans like you,
we know we truly are
"manufacturing consent!"

Best,
Moleman

Just FYI:

A few years ago, here in the
UK, the BBC decided to rerun
a classic series of M.A.S.H.
Whenever the program was
shown in the UK it had always
been without canned laughter.
The BBC used to remove the
false laugh track before
broadcast and the British
public loved it (and knew no
different). Unfortunately,
due to the late arrival of a
tape, they allowed one
episode to run with the
canned laughter still intact.
This caused a huge uproar and
many complaining letters were
sent to the BBC saying how
they had ruined the program
and spoiled everyone's
enjoyment. They never did it
again.

Maybe the people in the UK prefer
to think about the comedy and
make up their own minds
whether it is funny or not,
whereas the American audience
gets more enjoyment by
joining in with others and
creating a larger group
experience. Just a thought.

Neil King
<Neil.King@cannock.ac.uk>

Americans are herd creatures,
no doubt about it. But then
how can you compare us to a
country where the policemen
can't carry guns? I would not
react to a TV show in mute
loneliness any more than I
would respond to a crime in
progress armed only with a
billy club and a whistle. But
I still have my doubts about
Absolutely Fabulous or Dame
Edna fans as paragons of
rugged individualism, whether
they take their jokes
sweetened or straight.

Moleman

The Shit

Left for Dead in Malaysia, Neil Hamburger, Drag City, 1999 The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, Mark Dery, Grove/Atlantic, 1999 Crazy from the Heat, David Lee Roth, Hyperion, 1998 Keep It Like a Secret, Built to Spill, WEA/Warner Brothers, 1999 Abbott's Pizza Company, near the corner of Abbott-Kinney and California, Venice Beach, Los Angeles (delivery hours limited) Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Pink Floyd, CD remaster, EMI 1994 Motorhead, CD remasters, all Det Som Engang Var, Burzum, Misanthropy, 1998 Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park, Nashville, Tennessee A History of the Modern Fact, Mary Poovey, University of Chicago Press, 1998 V., Thomas Pynchon, HarperCollins Publishers, 1999 The Coffee Mill, Emeq Refaim, Jerusalem, Israel The Salesman and Bernadette, Vic Chesnutt, Capricorn Records, 1998 Good Morning Spider, Sparklehorse, Cema/Capitol, 1999 Third Floor, Anderson Building, Los Angeles County Museum of Art