From Fox's Arrested Development to NBC's The Office, these iconic comedies didn't need a laugh track to be hilarious.

Do parents on television ever have a clue? Short answer: no. Fictional adults are roughly as far away from any semblance of a clue as they are from the moon. Everything is there in plain sight, but ...

But the eventual rise of the internet and fractured viewing, not to mention changing taste and sensibilities, sent the laugh-track sitcom packing to give way to new forms of situational comedy.

“I’ve always been convinced that God hates me,” Mandyam jokes in the opening of his sitcom Failure to Launch. But behind the laugh track is a story rooted in cultural identity and family dynamic ...