Did the pandemic kill canned laughter?

Mashable

"Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to mark the passing of one of the most frequent visitors to our homes," says Chris Taylor. "We speak of the creature with a hundred voices and no face. The creature that, studies suggest, effectively manipulated our emotions more than anything on TV over the years. Yep, we're calling it: The sitcom laugh track, more recently known in the trade as 'sweetened' audience laughter, canned laughter to its enemies, is finally stone-cold dead in its eighth decade." While Taylor points to The Big Bang Theory's finale as a possible end to canned laughter, he notes that the pandemic has essentially signaled its death knell. "Historians will dispute the exact moment of death," says Taylor. "Was it when The Big Bang Theory, the last major sweetened sitcom, went off the air in 2019? Was it early in the COVID pandemic, when even the most unfiltered studio audience started to sound weird and quite possibly illegal? Was it only proven brain dead in late 2021, when no sweetened TV sitcoms debuted on U.S. networks during the all-important fall season?"