People Are Obsessed With the Uproarious Audience Laughter on ‘Whitney’

Whatever you thought of last night's premiere of the pilot of "Whitney," it's been pretty hard to ignore lo these many months of bus ads and TV promos. My personal takeaway from the pilot episode was that, while it's the worst of the three "Vagina shows" (or whatever the New York Times is calling them), the dude who plays Whitney's boyfriend, Chris D'Elia, is fantastic. Otherwise, from the pilot at least, "Whitney" seems to suffer from the opposite of Zooey Deschanel's "New Girl" disease: everything about "Whitney" is more okay than, well, Whitney. But that could easily be a case of the first-pilot try-hards!

Whitney, like the other girlie shows ("2 Broke Girls" and "New Girl," as if anyone could possibly forget), did well enough in the ratings that it probably won't be going away any time soon. "I chuckled a few times and laughed once" by Leila Cohan-Miccio at Crushable seems to sum up the critical reaction, but the people have spoken, and they have a real problem with one aspect of "Whitney" in particular: the audience over-laughter.

Despite Whitney Cummings herself reminding Tweeters that the audience was live (with an unfortunate typo she joked about later):

"You guys, this isn't a laugh track-those real people laughing and they would be very hurt if you thought they didn't exist #Whirney" —@WhitneyCummings

Twitter-user/viewers just couldn't get over the audience members making it sound like the most obvious and light jokes were causing tears to roll down their faces. They even had some theories:

"Hey guys, Whitney doesn't have a laughtrack. That's a studio audience. A drugged, tortured, threatened, brainwashed, starved studio audience." —@xmasape

"Did they give everyone in the "live studio audience" at WHITNEY pot brownies or what? Love love LOVE Zoe Lister-Jones, though." —@unclegrambo

You would think a show as supposedly sophisticated as "Whitney" would know to tone down the audience. Over-laughter only draws attention to the flaws in a show. Surely, after all the joking last night, NBC is lowering the volume on next week's laughter...somehow (maybe future audiences could be inspired by a "Laugh, but gently!" flashing sign?)

And if any of the Twitter jokes made you feel even one tiny bit bad for Whitney Cummings, keep in mind that between the success of "2 Broke Girls" and now "Whitney," she's having the best week of anyone in Hollywood this week! She's probably halfway through a bottle of Cristal right now. She's (over)-laughing all the way to the bank.

If you missed the show, here's the whole episode...hysterical laughter and all: