joe posts

I’ve been watching M*A*S*H DVDs – seasons 3 and 11. Basically.. I’ve been watching them for like a week straight, pausing only to watch Futurama’s new movie and, you know, work on a bunch of exciting copyediting assignments. But I am re-obsessed with the show. It’s playing right now in a little VLC window so I can blog about it at the same time. My neighbors are probably getting tired of hearing Suicide is Painless over and over again. Let me explain.

Unlike a lot of fans, I prefer the later episodes – I found the pre-Alda-takeover episodes to be just a little bit on the corny side. But the DVDs.. ahh.. the DVDs.. have blissfully given us the option of turning off the laugh track.

(Laugh track.. one word, or two? Blech. I’m all dictionaried out for today. Should there be a comma between word and or? Hmmm.. sigh.. turn off the brain.. it’s a blog..)

Anyhoo.

I didn’t realize how much the laugh track (or laughtrack) wrecked the show until I did a few simple comparisons – watching a scene that made me laugh without the laugh track, and then going back and switching the audio channel to hear how unfunny the fake-sounding giggles made the scene. It just never made sense to me. I could never help but wonder why an audience would follow a bunch of soldiers around and laugh at them? It was just bizarre – disrespectful to the troops, even. Heh.

The raging torrent of anger I felt at the newtork’s incompetence, which, from what I understand, forced this insane gigglefest onto the series in an attempt to make it ‘less dark,’ had clearly overshadowed my ability to appreciate the hilarity of the first few seasons. They’re pretty great. I think it’s just the awful way the laugh track was synced – the giggles tend to creep in just before a witty line, or simply filled in any and all silences during the “funny parts.”

As it turns out, the show can be as funny as any of our fancy modern-day non-laughtracked sitcoms. It’s not corny at all, really. If I can figure out how to post a video comparison, I might do that. After consulting a lawyer. Hah. Or not – It’s becoming sort of a game to guess the amount of copyrighted footage you can post online without getting noticed by The Man. Divide the profit margin of Fox studios by the age of the series (in hours), multiply by the Neilson ratings for the episode in question, factor in the DVD sales and subtract all that from the number of lawyers Fox has on retainer, multiply the answer by 100…. I’m guessing… 9.7 seconds? We’ll see.

So there you have it – Joe recommends you immediately run out and purchase the M*A*S*H DVDs. Or download them, if you’re a dirty filthy pirate who wants to hurt big corporations. And everybody knows, pirates are totally uncool.