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

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.

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.

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 ...

“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 ...