Recently, I asked people to send me anonymous questions again, which is always good fun until someone sends you something unpleasant. Anonymity and nasty messages, what are the odds?
Anyway, I particularly enjoyed this one, as it gives me an excuse to link to one of my favourite things ever.
“Favourite audience reaction in a sitcom? I know it’s difficult to choose. The reaction at the end of Seinfeld’s The Marine Biologist when George pulls Kramer’s golf ball out of his jacket has to be one of mine, love that woman who does the shriek when she realises what he’s holding.”
Having finally got round to a full rewatch of Seinfeld this year – yes, I know – I fully concur. The actual laugh is at 4:00 in the below video, in an episode which first aired in the US on the 10th February 1994.1
As for my own suggestions, my mind immediately turns to Red Dwarf. The obvious answer is the shrinking boxer shorts scene in “Polymorph”, followed by the reveal of the crew meeting the skeletons in “Kryten”. In fact, nearly all the huge audience reactions in the show come from the show’s early years in Manchester, which might be a riposte to anyone who says that the audience got louder in later years when the fans started attending recordings.
A less obvious answer, but still utterly glorious, is the following from “Bodyswap”, broadcast on the 5th December 1989. You don’t need to worry about the body swap shenanigans themselves – all you need to know is that thanks to a wiring fault, Lister’s order of “a milkshake and a crispy bar” ten minutes earlier set off the ship’s auto-destruct system:
It is, of course, the utter release of tension, as well as the joke itself, which creates such a hysterical reaction.
But for my money, one of the best audience reactions of all time is in Drop the Dead Donkey. In “Sally’s Libel”, broadcast on the 4th February 1993, we get the sad tale of footballer Pat “The Panther” Pringle, played by Paul Clarkson. Well, he was called “The Panther” until a horrendous own goal in the last minute of a semi-final, where he became known as “The Plonker” instead.
Luckily, after years in the wilderness, he’s finally got a job as Globelink’s new sports presenter. And so the gang make him feel comfortable in their usual inimitable fashion.
Interestingly, it works slightly differently to the Red Dwarf example above. It’s not about a release of tension; the tension is already released by the bathetic “Oh well, there you go!” So you think that’s the main joke… and then wham, David Swift comes on and leaves you gasping for breath.2
It’s as joyful and magical as television gets for me. And it creates the case for audience sitcom in and of itself.
Although annoyingly enough, despite including some of the lead-up, it doesn’t include any of Kramer playing golf on the beach earlier in the episode, which is key to the punchline. ↩
And leaving Stephen Tompkinson gasping for breath, covering his face to hide his corpsing. Which brings to mind Simon Day in the final Mid-Life Crisis sketch of You Ain’t Seen These, Right? ↩
5 comments
James on 26 November 2024 @ 9pm
Considering you mention Red Dwarf, I’m suprised you didn’t bring up the cackling woman in Confidence and Paranoia! That’s always stood out to me, though admittedly in an annoying way.
Smylers on 27 November 2024 @ 11pm
One thing that struck me about that Drop the Dead Donkey scene is how well it works leading into a commercial break: the shot lingers, and the burst of theme tune starts playing under it, with the audience laughter continuing on to the slide announcing the end of part 1. And after the break they can start with a new scene.
If the break hadn’t been there — if the programme had been made for the BBC, as originally envisaged — I don’t think it would have worked as well. Either it would seem odd milking the laughter for so long, or it would have to cut quickly to the next scene and the audience don’t get to enjoy the joke for as long.
I’d generally presumed that ad breaks are a necessary inconvenience and that programmes would be better without them, but this one actually seems to help deliver the punchline. So now my mind is scanning through BBC comedies and wondering if any of them would be enhanced by a carefully positioned break (not the forced sudden cut to ads we get when BBC shows are repeated on commercial channels, but proper ones with starts and ends) …
chris on 29 November 2024 @ 7pm
One that has stuck with me since I did a full Married…with Children re-watch during 2020 was Al Bundy making a toothpaste sandwich – some guy in the audience is not having it and says “Don’t do it!” like he’s watching the show at home.
John J. Hoare on 2 December 2024 @ 5am
That’s incredible. And reminds me of a moment in Fawlty Towers, The Germans, where – during all the nonsense at the end – you can clearly hear somebody from the audience yell “Go and have a lie down!”
Smylers: you’re absolutely right, of course. and I actually had something in this piece about that, and deleted it before posting. (This kind of thing happens quite a lot.) It does help that the music used in Drop The Dead Donkey is particularly pleasing.
There’s definitely some examples of original BBC episodes of Red Dwarf being shown on Gold/Dave, and actually benefiting hugely from the ad break. Not just in terms of selling a joke, but in terms of giving extra weight to plot developments too. I can’t remember the specific examples off-hand, though.
David Parson on 5 December 2024 @ 4pm
As someone not involved in TV production (I can’t speak for those who do, obviously!), those occasions when you get a sense that you’re hearing raw studio sound (when, for example, the audience laughter is allowed to continue and slowly subside in waves after the commercial break music has played, rather than be neatly faded) can actually make things funnier. The Gulf Report (2.1) has another example of this, as Sally’s greeted by a roomful of Craig The Crocodiles and promptly flounces out. I’m just relieved that the producers of the DDTD DVDs (a) retained the commercial breaks at all (can you imagine how the rhythm of nearly any episode would have been destroyed if they’d cut them, a la the Whose Line Is It Anyway? release), and (b) didn’t hastily fade the sound, at least in these cases.