Don't laugh, but many new comedies love the laugh track

Actor John Lithgow knew exactly the sort of sitcom he wanted ``Twenty Good Years," his new NBC show, to be: the old-fashioned kind, filmed before an audience, filled with the sound of people laughing.

``Even though the audience is primed and told that they have to laugh their heads off -- they're under instruction -- even so, if it's funny they will laugh, and if it's not funny you'll hear the forced laughter," Lithgow says. ``To me, it's closer to theater than film, and theater's better at comedy."

This year's Emmy nominations suggest that Hollywood thinks otherwise. Four of the shows contending for best comedy tonight -- Fox's ``Arrested Development," HBO's ``Curb Your Enthusiasm," and NBC's ``The Office" and ``Scrubs" -- are so-called single-camera shows, laugh-track free.

But it's the fifth, CBS's more traditional ``Two and a Half Men," that gets the consistent high ratings. And despite the conventional wisdom, the critics' scoffing, and the networks' increased interest in single-camera shows, the laugh-track comedy steadfastly refuses to die.

To Lithgow, that's good news for comedy.

``There have been some wonderful single-camera comedies," says the Emmy-winning veteran of NBC's hit ``3rd Rock from the Sun," an old-school multicamera show. ``But it's become the norm. And when it becomes the norm, you don't necessarily have to be funny, because you're not amusing an audience. And lo and behold, they're not very funny."

At the very least, the networks are trying to hedge their bets. More than half of the sitcoms in the fall 2006 lineup are accompanied by laugh tracks. Lithgow's show, which premieres in October, is a tale of two New Yorkers in a late-life crisis, costarring ``Arrested Development" veteran Jeffrey Tambor. (Of the live tapings, Tambor says, ``It was easier than I thought, but I was afraid of it.")

CBS will air four laugh-track-laden shows on Monday night s , including ``The Class," a new show about third-grade classmates reunited, produced by the team behind ``Friends." On Thursdays, Fox is offering two new multicamera shows: ``Happy Hour," about singles in an apartment building, and ``'Til Death," featuring ``Everybody Loves Raymond" star Brad Garrett. Three of four Sunday-night comedies on the CW have laugh tracks.

Even HBO, which helped to spark the single-camera boom with ``Sex and the City," tonight wraps up a season of ``Lucky Louie," its first multicamera sitcom.

Some networks have greenlighted multicamera shows in an effort to stand apart; Fox Entertainment president Peter Liguori has called his programming ``zigging while the other guys are zagging." And HBO Entertainment president Carolyn Strauss says she was deliberately searching for a multicamera show when ``Lucky Louie" crossed her path.

``I think we just wanted to see: What would an HBO multicamera be?" Strauss says.

In the case of ``Lucky Louie" -- which has yet to be officially renewed -- the result is foul language, nudity, and a living room traded for a tenement kitchen table. The chance to play with old conventions, Strauss says, was part of the appeal.

``It had become a very maligned art form, and it is an art form," Strauss says. ``We all felt it hadn't been done well in quite some time. It had become a show by committee. It had become a mass of rhythms and an amalgamation of jokes."

Still, there's comfort in the familiar. And some TV executives say they suspect that viewers aren't so sour on laugh tracks after all.

``A lot of young audiences . . . will say the sitcom is dumb, and yet they grew up watching `Mary Tyler Moore' and `The Cosby Show' on Nick at Nite and loved classic television," says NBC Entertainment president Kevin Reilly. ``They want `The Office,' and yet they'll probably tell you they want `Full House,' too."

These days, comedy pitches tend to be evenly divided between single- and multicamera shows, says Wendi Trilling , CBS's executive vice president for comedy development. And CBS has begun to produce what Trilling calls ``hybrids": laugh-track shows that extend the sitcom's physical boundaries far beyond the traditional living room couch.

``The Class," Trilling says, is filmed in front of an audience -- the pilot was directed by multicamera veteran James Burrows -- but it features more scenes, and more episodic storytelling, than an old-school multicamera show. ``How I Met Your Mother," which starts its second season next month, is filmed on a soundstage with no audience in sight. Once edited, the show is played for a crowd, which supplies a backdrop of laughs.

The laughter, Trilling says, ``adds to the energy of the show." And she insists that audiences don't find it jarring, as long as the jokes are good.

``When you watch a show that you find genuinely funny, you aren't offended by the laughs," she says. ``It makes it feel like an event that's happening at that moment."

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com.