Is Charlie Brown a counterculture icon?

Dear Hipster:

Immanuel Kant famously proposed that people should be treated as “ends in themselves,” not as a means to an end. As a corollary of that principle, people are supposed to help themselves and others achieve their own ends. Of course, you have heard the old chestnut about how the end justifies the means, right? I want to explore those ideas in relation to counterculture, which is where you come in, because hipsters are counterculture figures. Specifically, is counterculture and end in and of itself, or is it a means to some other end?

— Taylor

Although history is filled with hipsters and other counterculture figures who embraced the idea of counterculture as an end in itself, stepping outside the mainstream has always been a means to a noble end. Since it’s summer, I will use a Christmas-themed pop culture simile to drive the point home. However, before I start talking about Charlie Brown, let me ask you this: do you know the true story of TV laugh tracks? I bet that you, like most faithful sitcom fans, assume the laugh track has benign origins related to the superficial but understandable purpose of tricking viewers into thinking a show is funnier than it is. You’d be wrong, because in reality, the history of the laugh track is neither simple nor benign.

As to its complexity: up until the 1980s, all laugh tracks were the work of one production company. The handful of sound engineers who provided canned laughter would carefully tailor the laughter to reflect the comedy on screen. This leads to the more sinister question of why did we have laugh tracks in the first place? The answer, horrifyingly, is that, for about forty years, TV executives believed viewers would not know the difference between a comedy and a drama unless producers employed a laugh track to instruct people on what was funny. This combination of facts is among the weirdest and most bitingly cynical things I know about the history of popular entertainment. So badly mistrusting humanity that you can’t credit them the ability to distinguish between serious and jocular... it boggles the mind!

Now that you know how entrenched the culture of laugh tracks is in Hollywood comedy, you can really appreciate how monumentally countercultural it was for A Charlie Brown Christmas to eschew the laugh track. The 1965 special, which has become an iconic piece of sardonic humor that has even the most detached hipster tipping his hat in respect, famously refused demands from CBS to add a laugh track so viewers wouldn’t miss a punchline. If you’ve ever seen the movie, or read the Peanuts comic strip, you know easy punchlines are emphatically not part of the formula. There’s a reason that, when I was a little kid, I didn’t think Peanuts was all that funny, while now I think it’s hilarious. The challenge of picking out jokes is a big part of the sardonic humor, and you can imagine how badly a laugh track would have cheapened the entire experience. The show’s creators knew that, and they ignored conventional wisdom because they wanted to do something new and out-of-the-blue; something that would have people scratching their heads and questioning what they thought they knew about life, humor, and the holidays. Playing it safe by doing what everybody else did would never have gotten them where they wanted to be, so breaking the “rules” was an effective means of getting to an important end. Hipster Immanuel Kant would certainly have approved.