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.

This is an analogy Malcolm, the young long-suffering fourth-wall-breaking-hero of American sitcom Malcolm in the Middle ... For one thing, you are not prompted by a laugh track to laugh in the right ...

“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 ...