The Studio Audience Put Ted Danson in His Place During An Unfunny ‘Cheers’ Episode
Ted Danson and Fred Armisen commiserated this week about jokes that they thought were funny, but a live audience disagreed. “This must have happened to you all the time at Saturday Night Live,” Danson told Armisen during a recent episode of the Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast.
It’s a dilemma familiar to anyone who has performed live comedy, whether it’s stand-up, sketch or acting in a TV comedy. “All week long on Cheers, we would rehearse, and there was (a series of jokes) that we could barely get through. We would be rolling on the ground. It was so funny,” Danson remembered.
But then the hammer drops. “Audience comes, here comes the moment, and you could hear a pin drop,” he explained. “Instead of being horrified, it’s the funniest thing because your body is all of a sudden plummeting to earth.”
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“You feel it in your stomach,” empathized Armisen. “There were times when a moment like that would happen — total death, total silence.”
Armisen admitted that sometimes, the SNL cast “would blame the audience a little.” But later during the rehearsal or show, the crowd would roar at the jokes. So it wasn’t that the audience was off — they simply hated the sketch.
James Burrows, the sitcom legend who directed all of the Cheers episodes, knew the importance of finding the laughs. Three days before filming a sitcom episode, he’d run the show in front of a test audience, often with the cast still reading from their scripts. That process was useful, he wrote in his memoir, Directed by James Burrows, “to get a sense of where they’re going to laugh, whether they like these people, do we have story problems, et cetera.”
Burrows always tried to fill the test crowd with civilians — “industry people” tended to analyze the jokes and sit on their hands. Regular people let him know if the jokes were working.
Sometimes, Danson learned, there was a technological explanation for the lack of laughs. Burrows had a knack for knowing if that was the case. “One time, a joke died and he turned and looked to the audience,” Danson remembered. “He said, ‘Can you hear it? Are the mics on?’ And they went, ‘No! No!’ And we turned (the mics) on, and the joke killed.”
A week later, it was Danson’s turn to question why a seemingly funny joke got zero laughs. Following Burrows’ lead, he halted the filming and turned to the audience. “Wait a minute —can you hear us?”
“Yeah, we can!”
Danson learned his lesson. When Burrows asked the question, there was an audio snafu. When Danson called it, the audience’s response was, “We hear you, loud and clear.”
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