Chuck Lorre

The transcript does not label speakers, so the attributions below are inferred from context. The conversation opens with Chuck Lorre describing a show at the Singer Bowl in 1969. Jimi Hendrix headlined, and Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company was the warm-up act. Lorre says he and his friends bribed a security guard to get in, guessing they paid "$2 a piece," and then walked right up to the stage.

Lorre jokes that watching Joplin was the first time he thought he should start drinking Southern Comfort, "Because she's making it look pretty good." Joe Rogan answers with a story from his NewsRadio co-star Phil Hartman. Hartman worked as a stagehand at the Whisky when Hendrix played there, and his job was to hold a speaker with his hand because it was apparently unstable and Hendrix might knock it into the crowd.

The two describe the era's guitar-smashing and guitar-burning as "an expensive way To end the show" and "a rebellion thing." They name psychedelic drugs and the birth control pill as forces that arrived together. One of them says the pill "Gave women freedom" and "did the same for men," and they agree that everything "just all came together."

Rogan praises Lorre's book and says one of the things that bothers him most about the internet and streaming is the loss of the multi-cam sitcom. He remembers that as a comic in Los Angeles clubs he never heard people talk about The Big Bang Theory. Other shows were the ones it was cool to like, while Big Bang was seen as a clean family sitcom. Rogan calls it "a really well-written show." Lorre credits the effort behind it: "We worked really hard," with a general attitude that every episode had to work.

Lorre explains how he found his way into the show. He is "clearly not a physicist or by any means a genius" and calls himself a college dropout, so the quantum physics was never his thing. What he connected with was that the characters were outliers who "couldn't figure out how to behave in the real world." In his words, "being on the outside looking in, that I understood."

Rogan calls Lorre's life "such an American story": trying to make it in show business, trying to be a musician, "the whole Scientology thing," writing for big sitcoms, and the Roseanne period. He argues that American television history is largely defined by sitcoms such as All in the Family, Seinfeld and Friends, which became "almost like our extra family" for viewers watching every Thursday.

For me, it was characters. Nobody remembers the plot of a sitcom.

Lorre qualifies the point. The plots were great, especially on Seinfeld, and he says nobody plots a comedy story better than Larry David. But for him the "secret sauce" was that viewers wanted to hang out with the characters: sit at the bar with Norm, Cliff, Woody and Sam on Cheers, or have coffee with Jerry. Friends, he says, was a surrogate family viewers wanted to be part of. He concludes that "The stories were secondary," and the two credit "perfect casting" as well.

Rogan recalls arriving in Los Angeles in 1994, when sitcoms were why comics moved there at all. The goal was a network deal that would make you the next Roseanne, Jerry Seinfeld, Tim Allen or Brett Butler, a model that goes back to Cosby. He says that path "for the most part, doesn't exist anymore."

Lorre points to his current show with stand-up Leanne Morgan on Netflix, which he says is "doing pretty well." He also cites Young Sheldon's run on Netflix as evidence that a show can stand on its own. A whole generation of kids watched it without having seen The Big Bang Theory, and some of them don't know what CBS is. He calls that "our dream come true": the spinoff "wasn't standing on the shoulders" of the original. Rogan says he binged both shows and notes that Young Sheldon, a single-camera show, has a very different vibe.

Rogan says that with multi-cam "you're kind of in on it": viewers know a crowd is watching, so it's like watching a play. Lorre agrees: "It is a play," or more precisely "a play with four cameras rolling around in front of it." (A sponsor read for Squarespace interrupts the conversation here.)

Lorre describes the working rules. If someone makes a mistake, the scene is redone. If material stinks, it gets rewritten or cut rather than aired. He traces the form to theater in the 1950s and earlier radio plays. When asked about the first TV sitcom, he names Lucy and suggests Phil Silvers and George Burns may have come even earlier, but admits, "I don't know the deep history of it," except that it all came out of vaudeville and theater.

as I've always said, if it stinks in front of the audience, if you put it on TV, it's going to stink forever.

Lorre's sharpest factual claim concerns the laugh track. "We've never used a laugh track," he says. He has been accused of it for 40 years but never used one. As an example, he describes a reporter who sat in the audience at a Big Bang Theory taping, which takes three to three and a half hours, alongside about two hundred people laughing, and then wrote an article complaining about "the annoying laugh track." Asked whether this comes from negativity selling, Lorre's view is that critics "wanted diminish it."

Lorre argues that the word "sitcom" made sense for premises like being married to a witch or living with a genie, but not for a show like All in the Family. His reasoning: Archie being a bigot and "racially insensitive" is "not a situation. That's life." He admits he used to tell people he wrote "a TV comedy" instead, because he was embarrassed: "I was very insecure and the word hurt me. It physically hurt me."

Both men say sitcoms never got the respect film did in Hollywood, "Not even close," even though the work is in many ways harder. The conversation lays out the demands: making 200 people laugh every week for 22 weeks, coming up with a new scenario each week for five cast members, and juggling scenes. Network executives, studio executives, the actors' managers and the actors all feel "we live or die, depending on whether the audience laughs or not," with "no grace period."

On executive notes, Lorre says the interference happens "Early on" before a show succeeds. He describes the point when he stopped saying "yes, sir, no, sir" and began insisting "this is the way it's going to go." He adds that this "was predicated on having had success." He confirms the Leanne Morgan show is multi-cam and has just finished its second season.

Rogan says the only other current multi-cam he knows of is Miss Pat's "very funny show." The conversation puts the decline in numbers: there used to be "40 or 50 a week," and now "maybe three." Rogan tells Lorre he got out of network TV at the right time. Lorre agrees that "Timing-wise, I've been blessed."

Lorre is skeptical of declaring the genre dead. He says he has seen its eulogy many times over "the last 40-some-odd years" and finds it hard to buy, "because one great show changes everything." Rogan goes further, calling the disappearance of sitcoms a sign of television "mismanagement," since the form is fun, comforting, and loved by audiences.

Here the two openly disagree. Lorre first offers "Taste change, the culture changes," then makes a more specific claim: "I think laughing out loud is frowned upon." He uses White Lotus as his example. He calls it extremely well done, written, produced and cast, and calls Mike White brilliant, but says "you don't laugh watching it" and "it doesn't cause out loud laughter."

Laughter happens because you've been surprised by what you're watching or listening to.

Lorre explains that laughter is "not something self-generated. It happens to you," and that it requires being "vulnerable enough to let yourself react." He describes audiences who watch comedy with their arms folded, rejecting you "before you've opened your fucking mouth." Rogan says this happens most in Los Angeles and rejects Lorre's premise: "I don't agree at all. I think people love laughing."

Rogan describes Los Angeles as "an insanely self-important place" where people constantly judge each other's social status and look for chances to dismiss others. He qualifies this repeatedly: "Not everybody," there are "a lot of cool people there," and some are "fantastic people." His claim is that a larger percentage arrive "with a hole in their soul," and that they are the ones who cross their arms. He contrasts the city with New York, which he calls congested but "not tainted by show business."

Lorre partly concedes: "maybe I am a victim of Los Angeles" and "I live in a bubble." His evidence is that his shows do well worldwide. He names Germany, Mexico and Brazil, where Big Bang Theory cast members are "the Beatles down there," while noting it's "maybe not so much in Brentwood." Rogan adds an anecdote from when he was working on a sitcom: an unemployed actress he was dating told him she wouldn't do a sitcom because she wanted to do film.

Lorre stresses how hard the form is: "It's really hard to put on a play every week," and it is anxiety-ridden, stressful, and "doesn't always go well." He gives a concrete picture of a failed joke on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank.

When a joke fails at the Burbank Warner Brothers lot, and the audience doesn't respond, you can hear the 134 freeway.

He describes silence after a joke as a lesson in humility and revision. The “wild thunderstorm” image then leads into a concrete weekly process: writers share ideas, hold table reads and distinguish genuine laughter from an audience’s affection for familiar actors.

Lorre opens this stretch by describing the weekly sitcom cycle: a table read where "Everybody fake laughs", followed by days of working out "What's real?" before the episode goes in front of an audience. His formative example is Roseanne, which he describes as an enormous hit at the time. By his estimate, "maybe 40 million people were watching in real time" each week, before DVRs and at "Basically just the start of the VCR stuff." He credits a "great writing staff" and says he felt "really blessed" to be on it.