Spanish TV comedy: canned laughter and mocking others

Why Spanish television comedy relied on canned laughter

Was Spanish television comedy anything more than recorded laughter and mockery of others? For decades, the highest-rated formats were held up by background guffaws, costume sketches and jokes about other people's physical flaws. Some argue that this was not comedy, but a factory for outsourcing judgment. The objection is not new. What is new is the tone: people no longer ask for better humor, they ask for laughter on cue to stop.

Why was canned laughter used on television?

Because it told viewers the exact moment they were supposed to laugh, according to the harshest reading of the device: homemade social engineering. Background laughter turns a dubious sketch into an accepted one, and along the way teaches what is funny before the audience has time to decide for itself. The compilation shows of falls and accidents —the format of Vídeos de primera and its heirs— added the strong ingredient: other people's pain as fast-consumption material.

One participant brings an example: a video recorded in China where a robot miscalculates a dance, hits a child and those present laugh while the machine stands still. Read as a metaphor, the diagnosis is that of a society applauding the accident while the machine seems grief-stricken.

From Una manola and Esteso to Arévalo: the catalog of mockery

The generational review of Spanish humor by one of the participants is thorough: the after-lunch joker with one drink too many, the destape era of Una manola and Esteso's cinema (the risqué comedies of post-Franco Spain), the sketches of Martes y 13 and Los Sarracena. And above all of them, Arévalo, who is credited with building part of his repertoire on physical defects, illnesses and sensual orientations. It is a harsh reproach, and it is made with no more evidence than the viewer's memory of the person making it. The comedian died, according to that reproach, without anyone ever bringing the charge to him in public; that, more than the jokes, is what stings.

From landismo to the fake guffaw in the auditorium

The most ambitious accusation in the lot says that landismo (the sens comedy genre of late Franco-era Spain) was manufactured to give Spanish men complexes and demoralize them. A hypothesis hard to prove and easy to ridicule, but it fits the rest of the pattern: leveling downward. The other side is paid laughter. Two hours of comedy show antiestéticaturing two well-known names from radio and television, and an entire room competing to deliver the loudest guffaw, describe a social ritual more than a show.

The exceptions that survive: Mr. Bean, Cruz y Dosis de poleo and the absurd

Even the author of the harshest thesis grants some leeway: Mr. Bean and Cruz y Dosis de poleo, especially when they impersonated celebrities or invented catchphrases like si hay que ir, se va ("if we have to go, we go"). The list also includes Faemino and Cansado, Muchachada Nui and the occasional unclassifiable series. Then the present arrives and the package splits in two: some argue that the only humor that works today is saying the truth out loud; others reply that today's comedy is activism. The two accusations look too much alike.

Forty years of background laughter make for a lot of archive and no nostalgia. Having seen the file, the after-lunch joke dying of boredom is, almost, the only good news.