Laugh tracks

[Madame Adequate]

Gawd, that first post of yours is just perfectly written. xD It amazes me how you can capture things and feelings in words that I myself wouldn't even know where to begin describing.

Flattery will get you everywhere, my dear Lev

Also, TV Tropes tells me that people were really weirdly into the design of laugh tracks (back when they were tracks rather than in front of an audience.) Here:

Although it may not seem so, laugh tracks were surprisingly sophisticated systems at the height of their use. Rather than being just simple recordings of a laughing audience, they were actually carefully generated and mixed, with such discrete components as "the guy who gets the joke early" and "housewife giggles" and "the one who didn't get the joke but is laughing anyway" all precisely blended and reblended to create the illusion of a real audience responding to the show.

Is that why laugh tracks usually have some incredibly irritating individual who you can always pick out and notice?