*clears throat*

I hate laugh tracks.

[ Laugh track starts ]

I think they're annoying -

- unnecessary, and honestly I find them to be kind of an insult to the viewer's intelligence.

It's like the show doesn't trust you to know when to laugh so they have to basically hold up a big sign after every joke

And say "look that was joke it time to laugh now",

but then at the same time it also kind of feels like a lack of confidence in their own jokes.

Like the writers know that these lines aren't that funny

So they have to like peer pressure you into laughing

Because listen to how much these other people are laughing you should be laughing - most of all though

I hate laugh tracks because as a viewer when I hear the sound of canned laughter

I am completely taken out of what in my opinion

Should be an immersive experience

I want to watch a show and feel like a fly on the wall during a realistic human

Interaction and yet a laugh track serves as a constant reminder that these characters whose lives

You're trying to get invested in are not actually characters

They're just actors acting on a stage in front of a live audience

That reacts to every joke like they just woke up from a long coma and this is the first joke they've heard in 20 years

Joey: "Closeness schmoseness, there was 3 of us for cryin' out loud!"

[ audience laughs like they just woke up from a come and is this the first joke they've heard in 20 years ]

In addition to being an auditory distraction laugh tracks also mess up the flow of

Every scene even if you remove the actual sound of the laughter it's still evident that these conversations

Have a very unnatural rhythm

Pink Shirt Lady: "Get one yourself!"

[ awkward silence ]

Beer Nerd: "Oooh Somebody's been taking bitchy pill!"

[ even more awkward silence ]

Pink Shirt: "God, he's an ass when he drinks"

Outfit Matching Nerd: "Well, he's an ass when he doesn't, you just don't hear it."

[ silence ]

Line! Long pause. Line! Long pause. I've never in my life had a conversation with that cadence

It's just not how people talk, probably the worst thing about these laugh tracks

Is that they don't always

Correlate with the quality of the joke every response seems to indicate the same level of hilarity when here's the thing

Some jokes are just better than others

I don't expect every line to elicit this room wide eruption of laughs and cheers

And I don't hold it against a show if a joke doesn't make me audibly laugh

but when a throwaway line is followed up by several wasted seconds where I'm just waiting for the next joke and

Then it happens again

And again and again I get impatient

And I don't want to watch the show anymore these episodes are about twenty two minutes long

And it feels like I'm only getting maybe ten minutes of actual comedy, and that's when my brain hatched an idea

Exactly how much of an average episode of Friends is just laughter?

What percentage of each episode's 22 minute runtime is wasted by a glorified sound effect?

And then to take it one step further how many jokes are there in an episode of Friends,

Compared to an episode of, let's say, The Office?

Obviously quantity and quality aren't the same thing and one good joke is better than a hundred bad ones

But in this case I do think quantity is a pretty good indicator of overall writing quality.

So I had to know I had to get to the bottom of this

00:03:01,450 --> 00:03:02,540 But how?

And then I remembered I have a youtube channel I can do stuff like this

[ Elevator Music ]

Now keep in mind about 90% of this video is simply gonna be opinion based

I may present a lot of what I'm saying as if it were fact

But what most of it comes down to is simply personal preference

So let's start with The Office. The Office is my favorite show of all time

I'm a bit of a basic bitch, so no I'm not talking about the British version nor the Japanese version for that matter

I'm talking about the American office because here in the USA

We may not be the first to do and stuff

But I'll be damned if we aren't the best.

The office combines everything I want in a comedy show

Again, personal preference.

It's hilarious, it's quick,

But there's also a lot of depth to it.

Characters develop deep meaningful relationships that have ebbs and flows and give each episode more of a purpose.

Particularly in the first three seasons with the back-and-forth between Jim and Pam.

More than anything though

I love the way The Office is directed.

You can tell there's so much deliberation involved in setting up the perfect shots.

Which is something that may seem small

But I think the movement and position of the camera can contribute so much to the tone of a scene..

As well as even serving as a joke in its own right.

For example in the season 2 episode entitled "The Carpet",

After it's been established that someone took a dump in Michaels office

And no one can go in there because it smells so bad,

Michael has a talking head bit where he kind of rambles about how this is like his fear factor audition

Eventually he can't stand it anymore and starts to rush out of the room.

But it's at that moment that the camera zooms out to reveal that even the cameraman didn't want to be in that room.

It's a small detail, but it was enough to make me chuckle and feel smart for noticing it.

But I'm rambling..

I love the show. I could talk about it for hours,

But the title of this video isn't why I like The Office,

It's The Office vs. Friends

So I will try and get to the point.

How many jokes are in one episode of The Office?

Now, no scientific endeavor would be complete without taking an educated guess beforehand,

so here's my hypothesis

I'm gonna say that an episode of The Office averages 140 jokes

Which is roughly 1 joke every 9 seconds.

On the other hand, I'm gonna guess that an average episode of Friends contains about half that.

Let's say 80 jokes or one joke every 15 seconds.

In addition, I'm gonna guess at approximately three and a half minutes of every Friends episode is just laughter,

And I'm also gonna guess that roughly 7% of you just clicked off the video when I started rambling about math

So let's speed this up a bit for the office. I chose season 5 episode 14

"Stress Relief Part 1" this episode is near and dear to my heart

The opening scene alone is an absolute work of art Dwight for awareness reasons

Intentionally starts a fire in the office to see how prepared everyone would be in that situation which is funny enough on its own

But then he has this

self-righteous attitude throughout the scene while everything

Deteriorates into chaos led by Michael who immediately puts his safety before everyone else's there are so many hilarious

Details like Kevin going back to break into the vending machine..

Angela hurling her cat into the ceiling..

Stanley ultimately having a heart attack as Dwight explains that this was all a test.

From start to finish, it's beautiful, and there are 41 jokes in it.

After the opening theme,

The next scene is a meeting between Michael Dwight and 2 corporate higher-ups.

Halfway through the scene michael casually gets up and sort of waltzes over to the other side of the table

Trying to subtly switch his role in the situation and then starts lecturing Dwight.

There are 16 jokes in the scene,

3 during their car ride back to the office,

and 11 in the next scene

Where Stanley comes back to the office and Michael offers him a wheelchair.

Quote: "Until he's back on his feet."

Stanley: I'm going to die.

After a commercial break comes one of the greatest scenes in television history..

The CPR training scene.

If someone asked me

"Hey, Drew! I want to get into comedy writing. Where do I start?"

I would say...

"I don't know... I just make Youtube videos."

But I would tell them to study this scene.

I don't even know where to start with this, so I'll let Steve Carrell set it up.

Michael: "We found ourselves on the...

less prepared side of things.

When Stanley had his...

When his heart went berserk...

I knew exactly what to do,

But in a much more real sense

I had no idea what to do.

so I thought we should have a CPR training class."

So this woman has been hired by corporate to teach the office CPR.

Michael instinctively volunteers Stanley,

You know, the guy who just had a heart attack 3 days ago?

But then after the rest of the office starts to express concern,

He decides that the boss should go ahead and everyone how it's done.

Instructor: "Okay, too fast."

The instructor has to try repeatedly to get things back on track...

Inst: "No, it's [singing] 'uh, uh, uh, uh, stayin' alive, stay-' "

Michael: "Okay, that's it."

Creed: "You were in the parking lot earlier, that's how I know you!"

Oh! And Creed...

Fucking Creed!

He has two lines in this entire episode

And they're both hysterical!

Dwight: "Check for an organ donor card. If he has one, we only have minutes to harvest."

Creed: "He has no wallet, I checked."

This scene is so well written the way everything slowly gets more and more heightened the way each

character progressively gets more involved

it's

fantastic

And there are 37 jokes in it so after Dwight destroys the very expensive

CPR dummy he and Michael are once again forced to go meet with David Wallace in New York

This is a short scene with only five jokes we then cut back to the office where Jim, Pam, and Andy are watching a movie

He downloaded illegally

Which doesn't exist outside of the show.

So props to the producers for actually shooting clips from a fake movie where Jack Black falls in love with Cloris Leachman

I counted nine jokes in this scene, eight in the next scene where Dwight issues his statement of regret

Dwight: "I state my regret."

And another eight when Jim Pam and Andy finished the Jack Black movie

The episode ends with Michael leading a relaxation exercise

Which you guessed it is not very relaxing. There are 28 jokes in the scene and the episode is over

In total, I counted 166 jokes in 21 minutes

Which is only slightly higher than my hypothesis you guys want to double check my math go for it

I also tried to be as unbiased with this as possible

I included punchlines that didn't make me laugh

But I recognized as having meant to be a joke if I refuse to tally jokes that I don't think are funny

Then why the hell am I even doing this you know besides, this is science

So now let's transition over to Friends- controversial opinion alert!

I...

Actually like friends now if I hadn't watched it with my mom growing up and didn't have a little bit of a nostalgia for it

I probably feel differently, but I think it's a pretty okay show it's got a likable enough characters even though

They're all mostly reliant on pretty basic

Stereotypes: Rachel likes to shop, and Monica likes to clean, and Phoebe's wacky! And Chandler sarcastic,

and Ross is awkward, and Joey likes to fuc-, but five out of the six actors are good

[ check description ]

And the writing is usually fine with the exception of the occasional

Awful joke thrown in from time to time

Chandler: "Anybody know a good tailor?"

Joey: "You need some clothes altered?"

Chandler: "No, no, I'm just looking for a man to draw on me with chalk..."

[ Audience laughter ]

As far as the laugh track goes I can forgive shows like friends for having a dated format because

Well the show premiered almost 25 years ago. It's not really dated

If it literally is dated, and that's just what sitcoms were like back. Then it was a standard

I'm much less

Understanding of shows that have debuted in the past decade that rely on this format originally this video was going to be The Office vs.

The Big Bang Theory aka the world's worst show, but I felt like that would be too easy

It's like making a video on Lele pons like we all know she's bad

I don't know anyone who actually likes the Big Bang Theory and

Honestly watching multiple episodes for research purposes just sounds like a nightmare so I ultimately decided on Friends because it is a show that people

Generally enjoy. It's just I think sometimes a slave to its own format

There are moments in every episode where I have to fight the urge to incrementally skip forward past

predictable back-and-forth scenes where you know what the next line is gonna be but you get a wait for the audience to calm down so

They can say it, but because of all this anticipation. That's built up now that line gets the enormous over-the-top applause

It's very formulaic and that is the exact phenomenon that led me to want to make this video in the first place

So let's get into it how much of a typical episode of Friends is just laughter funny story

I wasn't sure which episode to choose here

So I went on IMDB to see the highest

Rated um the second highest is the one where everyone finds out and I was like oh, I remember that one

That's a good episode. I'll do that and then I realized holy shit this just happens to be season 5 episode 14

Which is the same as the ah so this is a perfect comparison?

And I will not listen to anybody who tries to dispute that yes. It's all coming back to me now

This is definitely one of the best episodes the basic synopsis is

Spoiler alert! Chandler and Monica have been secretly dating for the past like 15 episodes and only Joey knows

Rachel and Phoebe find out because they see Chandler and Monica having sex

But rather than confront them they try to mess with them by having Phoebe flirt with Chandler

It goes back and forth until it all climaxes at the end of the episode they kiss Chandler freaks out tells Monica

He's in love with her the crowd goes woo, end of episode. Yes

That was a significantly shorter synopsis than the one I did for the office

But I realized I didn't want this video to be like 90 minutes long so got a cut corner somewhere in this episode

I counted in 21 laughs which is

Surprisingly high actually. I definitely way underestimated the friends writers

But I also way

Underestimated the amount of time the audience reactions would take out my guess was three and a half minutes not even close now

I will say I included scene transitions in this not the theme song

but the silly little stings they play in between scenes because I felt like these are as much of a waste of time as the

laugh tracks

But anyway after isolating these two things I was left with 5 minutes and 20 seconds: over