Plagiarism and Laugh Tracks

"Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age", by Trip Gabriel, addresses the increasingly prominent issue of plagiarism that seems to be second nature to most students today. There's no nice way to express my feelings about plagiarism, so instead I'll just make a list where I do it meanly.

1. It's impossible to get through a grade school education (esp. one geared toward higher education) without learning about plagiarism. Students say they didn't know any better? I say, "BULLSHIT." (Bolded and in caps!) We have all heard the spiel from teachers for years. Years, I tell you.

2. You didn't write that stuff. You didn't go out and do hours of painstaking research. You didn't assemble it in a coherent and scholarly manner. So don't claim that you did! It's so obvious when students take credit for things that they didn't do. And professionals? How dare you.

3. If you're not willing to credit the author, then as Sarah Wilensky stated in the article, this "fosters laziness". There's no getting around it. If you're not willing to put in the effort to give credit where it's due, then your work is probably not worth reading.

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And now for something completely different.1

Oh, Chuck Klosterman. You silly, silly man. In his passage entitled "'Ha ha,' he said. 'Ha ha.'", Klosterman describes just how much he despises laugh tracks. I suppose he brings up a lot of good points that I might have at one point thought, but that I've never voiced.

Laugh tracks encourage people to laugh at certain points in television shows. It's basically "canned laughter" (and indeed, he calls it this). Is this due to the insecurity that Americans feel while they're watching television, like they might not "get" whatever it is that should be "gotten"? On the surface, it appears to make TV shows' jokes funnier... but for someone who's actually stopped to consider the nature of laugh tracks, they're insulting and just outright idiotic. Klosterman mentions having gone to Germany for four months, and how awkward it was for him to fake-laugh in conversations. This directly reflects our American attitude toward linguistics; we can't stand silence, and the laughter serves as a sort-of reinforcement for our insecurities. We've effectively been conditioned to laugh even when we don't mean it.

In my opinion, this is definitely a piece with which I can agree. Maybe the more "sophisticated" and "intelligent" TV shows don't use laugh tracks, but they succeed in a plethora of ways: for one, they leave comedy open to interpretation, which is fantastic. Additionally, the subtlety of the humor in shows is increased, which can give a gratifying sensation to people who pick up on it. (And come on, admit it. We all like feeling a bit superior sometimes.)

1 You have to have seen something like this before. If not... for shame.