Is ‘Fuller House’ Filmed in Front of a Live Audience?

Fuller House is back, baby! Season 4 of the Full House revival is now on Netflix, providing you with a few hours of frantic Fuller fun (and a whole lot of Gibbler goofiness, too). But there’s one misconception that a lot of people have about old school sitcoms like Fuller House, as well as its old-is-new-again network counterparts The Conners, Will & Grace, and Murphy Brown. What’s with the canned laughter? Is it canned laughter? Is Fuller House filmed in front of a live audience?

The answer is… yes! That laughter is not canned and it’s not fake. It’s the sound of an actual crowd of Fuller House fans laughing at all those antics and woo-ing at all those reveals. If you’re looking for proof, look no further than Kimmy Gibbler’s own personal vlog. In the lead-up to Season 4’s release, Andrea Barber showed her YouTube audience what it’s like working on Fuller House. Even if you’re not interested in Fuller House, it’s a fantastic, fun, and informative look at all the hard work that goes into putting on what’s essentially a stage play with cameras for an eager audience every week.

The same goes for all the other multi-cam shows on the major networks right now, too. That’s why shows like The Conners and Will & Grace really underline this fact by saying up top, “X was taped in front of a live studio audience.” They know there’s a stigma behind all that “canned” laughter and they want you to know that all those chuckles are fresh AF.

And in the case of Murphy Brown, creator Diane English addressed this misconception on Twitter when someone called it a “laugh track.”

In fact, the audience is so real that all that laughter usually has to be dialed back. The Good Place creator Michael Schur talked about that in a recent podcast interview regarding his upcoming NBC multi-cam sitcom Abby’s.

“I used to think when I watched multi-cam shows, oh man, this is all fake laughter,” Schur said in the I Think You’re Interesting podcast around the 54:30 mark. “They’re just juicing the laughter. I can tell you now from personal experience that mostly what you do in post [production] with multi-cam shows is remove laughter, because live audiences are really happy and they laugh a lot at stuff and they laugh at things that aren’t even jokes really sometimes! It’s because they’re enjoying watching a play.”

So when you hear those laughs on Fuller House or most any multi-cam show, know that you’re hearing real people having real responses (albeit heightened because, holy crap, they’re so close to the actors they’ve loved on TV for years!).

Stream Fuller House on Netflix