LIFE WITHOUT A LAUGH TRACK LIVE AUDIENCE, CANNED CHUCKLES NOT A PART OF ALL COMEDIES ON TV.

Byline: David Kronke Television Writer

``The Hank McCune Show'' lasted three short months in late 1950 yet merits consideration a half-century later thanks to one dubious factoid.

``The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows'' notes that the show boasted ``an innovation in a soundtrack that contains audience laughter ... the practice may have unlimited possibilities.''

Unlimited, indeed. Fake and ``sweetened'' laugh tracks, made exponentially more raucous by turning up the volume knob on the anemic titters of a studio audience, have been a staple of television comedy ever since.

Hank's contraption hasn't been bursting forth with its canned peals of laughter much lately. Many hands have been wrung this television season over the sorry plight of sitcoms. Here's a question more vexing than any on ``Who Wants to Be a Millionaire'': Are the days of the standard sitcom, shot in front of an audience of dazed, dozing tourists bused in from Hollywood Boulevard, on the wane?

Sitcom woes began before the season got started. Folks handing out Emmys decided that there were no sitcoms worthy of a trophy and gave the Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy to a category interloper, David E. Kelley's hourlong dramedy, ``Ally McBeal.'' Since then, every sitcom introduced at the beginning of this season has been canceled, or should be - only ``Ladies Man'' on CBS and ``Stark Raving Mad'' on NBC survive, thanks mainly to solid time slots, and they both will soon make room for midseason replacements.

The season's only new hit comedy is ``Malcolm in the Middle,'' a family series that eschews laugh tracks and is shot with one camera, like TV dramas. NBC's midseason-replacement comedies likewise eschew the traditional: Two, ``God, the Devil and Bob'' and ``Sammy,'' are animated; one, ``M.Y.O.B,'' is a single-camera show; one, ``Daddio,'' is a family series; and the last one, ``Battery Park,'' adds more cameras, including a Steadicam, and many sequences not shot before its studio audience. CBS, too, is reintroducing ``Grapevine,'' a single-camera show that was first seen as a summer replacement sitcom in 1992.

Rolling Stone TV writer David Wild, author of ``The Showrunners,'' a portrait of the people who create television series, says, ``The sitcom has virtually been killed from overuse. In the past, people have seen just about every possible situation, not only in prime time but also in syndication. There's nothing more soul-killing than watching an unfunny sitcom. Someone has to reinvent the form.''

Doug Herzog, president of Fox Entertainment, seems to agree. ``You talk to younger people in this country, and what you'll hear them say about sitcoms is, 'They're for my parents - that's what my parents watch,' '' Herzog says. ``And there's something about the traditional sitcom format, and there's something about that canned laughter that I think is unnerving to younger audiences.''

Garth Ancier, president of NBC Entertainment, disagrees: ``I don't think the four-camera, laugh-track thing is dead at all. I completely disagree. When those shows are well-written around people you care about, they work. No one seems to complain about 'Will & Grace' as a four-camera show, because it's funny, the idea is good, and the cast is good.''

Ironically, only one of NBC's five midseason comedies is a traditional, four-camera/live audience sitcom.

So should we box up the laugh-track machines and ship them off to the Smithsonian, or at least the Museum of Television and Radio? Wild says, ``Obviously, it's annoying; we've been laugh-tracked to our elbows. But the important thing is, we're not laughing. We wouldn't notice the laugh track if we were laughing.''

Linwood Boomer, creator of ``Malcolm,'' admits, ``I think the show would really fall dead in front of an audience, just in the pile. I'm not sure if a studio audience would feel real comfortable laughing when a wheelchair goes over. It is a sizable investment for both the network and the studio to invest in a single-camera show. It's a lot more expensive and a lot more time consuming.''

Al Higgins, co-executive producer of 'Malcolm,' adds, ``My problem with the audience is that you need to force jokes in there, usually three jokes a page, to keep them laughing. It's easier to make people laugh with a setup-joke, setup-joke format. But that's also how you make your story more false, when you feel you have to get a laugh.''

Indeed, those who create sitcoms increasingly have little use for these cues telling the poor schnooks when they should be busting a gut. Don Roos, who created the upcoming NBC single-camera sitcom ``M.Y.O.B.,'' flatly states, ``I don't like laugh tracks. So when I wanted to do a show, I wanted to make sure that I could do it like a small movie, where the characters say things for their own reasons and logic and not just to get a laugh. This is a response to sitcoms, in a way. They just don't appeal to me.''

Gary David Goldberg enjoyed phenomenal success with ``Family Ties,'' but his ``Brooklyn Bridge,'' produced without a laugh track, struggled despite critical acclaim. Nonetheless, of his upcoming NBC cop comedy ``Battery Park,'' he says, ``We would be happy without a laugh track. We have an audience, but our show is kind of a hybrid. We have six cameras, we have Steadicams, we shoot outdoors, we shoot behind the sets, we have shorter scenes. It's not as friendly to that (studio) audience, and we just keep pushing the pace. We don't hold for those laughs quite the way we did on 'Family Ties.' But, yes, we'd like to do this without a laugh track.''

On the other hand, some highly successful showrunners swear by the laugh track.

``Laugh tracks aren't annoying when the show's funny,'' offers Phil Rosenthal, executive producer of ``Everybody Loves Raymond,'' which in its fourth season is drawing its largest audiences to date, routinely beating Emmy winner ``Ally McBeal.'' ``Seeing a show with a live studio audience is like seeing a live theatrical presentation. You feel part of a large audience; it's sort of communal in that way.

``Also, you're seeing actors react in subtle ways to that live studio audience, and that enhances that live-performance feeling. It gives the show that much more energy than a one-camera show with no laugh track. It's almost not conscious - they're creating that enthusiasm on their own.''

``The Drew Carey Show'' co-creator Bruce Helford swears by his studio audience. ``When a joke doesn't work, we rewrite it right there on the spot - we fix the show as we go. One-camera allows you to get lazy; there's no testing ground. A writer can say, 'Well, that's kind of funny,' and there's no audience to call him on it.''

Moreover, Helford points out, audiences have come to expect laughs from a sitcom soundtrack. He notes that the struggling comedy ``Sports Night,'' which doesn't have a laugh track, follows ``Dharma & Greg,'' which is taped before an audience. ``People watch that show and wonder, 'Why isn't anybody laughing?' It can hurt a show in terms of a mainstream audience. The show doesn't seem funny. Not that it isn't, but you don't hear those knockdown guffaws. 'Malcolm' gets away with it because it follows 'The Simpsons,' which also has no laugh track.''

Likewise, showrunners are divided on whether the cheaper method of shooting a show in one night before four cameras will be replaced by the far more polished single-camera style.

Higgins says 'Malcolm' ``couldn't be represented in four-camera - it wouldn't capture the nuances. You wouldn't be able to see this messed-up family from the perspective of inside this kid's head. This way, you have Malcolm telling the audience, 'I'm in this messed-up family, but I know it, and it's OK.' It wouldn't be effective if you didn't know that Malcolm knew what was going on. We're helping comment on the action with camera angles and close-ups and how the frame is focused. We can do an extreme close-up on Malcolm's eyes or props on the set and point out the humor. The way the camera insinuates itself into the action - that's our laugh track.''

``Raymond's'' Rosenthal, on the other hand, is happy with the four- camera system. ``Even if we did one-camera filming, a lot of the dialogue would be the same. You might see them walk through the house more smoothly, or in a car or outside. But 'Raymond' is squarely in the tradition of sitcoms - the audience understands it's presentational, that there are the same four or five sets every episode. Within those parameters, we're as realistic as possible.''

CAPTION(S):

7 photos

(1 -- 4) Photo: Shows that don't use laugh tracks include, clockwise from left, NBC's new ``M.Y.O.B.,'' ABC's ``Sports Night,'' and Fox's ``Malcolm in the Middle'' and ``Ally McBeal.''

(5) ``No one seems to complain about 'Will & Grace' as a four-camera show, because it's funny, the idea is good, and the cast is good,'' says NBC Entertainment president Garth Ancier.

(6) Bruce Helford, co-creator of ``The Drew Carey Show,'' says one-camera shows ``(allow) you to get lazy.''

(7 -- color -- cover) Why isn't Malcolm laughing?