After all these years, the laugh track survives

Open: Brad's front room in the evening. Mrs. Brad sits, watching TV, as Brad enters the room.

(Crowd applauds loudly, recognizing the star of the show.)

Brad (in Ricky Ricardo accent from "I Love Lucy"): Hi honey, I'm hoooome!

(Laughter)

Mrs. Brad: Well, it's about time. I was about to see if a picture of you was on the side of the milk carton!

(Laughter)

Brad: Are you a time traveler from 1980? (He looks at the camera and shrugs. Laughter, then applause)

Mrs. Brad: Speaking of 1980, your haircut looks like it's from 1980.

(Crowd shouts, "ohhhhh!" then laughs, then applauds)

Brad: You'll never guess what I learned today.

Mrs. Brad: How to tie your shoelaces?

(Laughter)

Brad: No, more important than that. And with velcro, who needs shoelaces? (Crowd chuckles) Anyway, think of sitcoms.

Mrs. Brad: Hmmm. I think I can do that. (She looks at the camera and rolls her eyes. Crowd laughs.)

Brad: Doesn't it seem like laugh tracks for those shows went out of style a few decades ago? That modern shows don't or shouldn't have laugh tracks and that most of the new shows are shot with a single camera?

(Crowd grumbles)

Mrs. Brad: I don't know, but we need laugh tracks! How else would people know when to laugh?

(Long applause)

Brad: I don't know about that. Shouldn't it be obvious when to laugh? You laugh when something's funny.

Mrs. Brad: Well, then how would they know when to laugh when you say something?

(Crowd laughs)

Brad: Why I oughta . . . 

(Crowd chuckles)

Mrs. Brad: Oughta get a haircut from this century?

(Laughter, then applause)

Brad: But seriously, there are currently 12 adult sitcoms on network TV and seven of them use laugh tracks . . . or least some canned laughter. The fake kind.

(Audience gasps)

Mrs. Brad: It's not fake. It was real laughter when it was recorded.

(Applause)

Brad: But some of the people laughing on 2025 sitcoms are dead. They've been dead for decades. They were recorded in the 1950s!

(Audience gasps)

Mrs. Brad: You're a real ray of sunshine, you know that?

(Laughter)

Brad: It just seems weird that something that seems so outdated remains so strong. I thought the best recent sitcoms are all those single-camera, non-laugh-track shows. It turns out that the laugh-track sitcoms are still happening. It's like we're too dumb to know what's best.

Mrs. Brad: When you say we're too dumb to know what's best, are you talking about TV or the elections? (Crowd shouts "ohhhh" and then applauds.) And what shows are you talking about that don't use a laugh track?

Brad: "The Office." And shows like that.

Mrs. Brad: OK. What other shows don't have laugh tracks?

Brad: Umm. "M*A*S*H*?" "Barney Miller?"

(Laughter)

Mrs. Brad: They went off the air nearly 50 years ago. Is there any show since then that you can cite?

Brad: Seinfeld?

(Laughter)

Mrs. Brad: Anything after the invention of fire?

(Laughter)

Brad: Why I oughta!

(Laughter)

Mrs. Brad: Maybe the reason is that a laugh track is reassuring. Maybe it's just a way for people to feel comfortable and maybe it's a way that older audience members can feel a connection to the past. You know, maybe we should do that: Have a connection to the past?

Brad: Do you mean?

(Henry Winkler walks on stage)

Winkler: Aaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!

(Crowd cheers wildly.)

Brad: Why I oughta!

(Crowd laughs, breaks into applause and screen fades into the credits)

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

Shocking study: Women say more words than men during adulthood

Women speak more words per day than men, but only during a very specific period of life.

Of course, that period of life is 25 to 65.

So . . .  most of adulthood, which is a strange thing to pull out like it's a weird little period of time. It's 40 years. In terms of the study's findings, 43.8 million more words are spoken by an average woman during that period than an average man.

Nearly half are asking how a man is feeling or suggesting how should drive. But I jest.

The finding – that women speak 3,000 more words daily than men during most of their adult life – is probably no surprise to most women other than Mrs. Brad. Who, if the data is true, must say many, many, many words to herself.

The study, conducted by University of Arizona researchers and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (which has a tremendous advice column and hilarious comic strips), found that the average 25- to 64-year-old woman spoke 21,845 words per day, compared to the average men of the same age, who spoke 18,570 words (my guess at most common of those male words: "Huh?" "What?" "Whatnot" and "Cool.").

For context of just how many words that is, my columns average about 600 words. The Declaration of Independence is 1,320 words. Novels are usually around 100,000 words. The Bible is about 780,000 words. That last meeting you were forced to attend featured about 1 billion words.

So the average woman says a novel's-worth of words in a five-day period. The average man needs an additional day-plus to reach that level. 

An earlier University of Arizona study from 2007 by the same researcher found that women and men each say about 16,000 words per day, but the follow-up study found differently. The first study focused primarily on college-aged people who lived near Austin, Texas (why would the University of Arizona study people who lived near the University of Texas? They're not even in the same conference!) so it wasn't seen as widely representative. This version used far more participants in multiple countries with a wider age range.

There was no signficant differences between genders for those ages 10-24 and 65 and older. But from 25-64? Hoo boy.

According to the researchers, one reason that women talk more during that period is they are generally the primary caretaker for children, so they speak more words. Others just think blah, blah, blah. (I wasn't paying attention. Sorry.)

The least talkative person in the survey spoke about 100 words a day and the most talkative spoke more than 120,000. You probably know both of those people and have probably been stuck in a longer-than-comfortable scenario with each of them.

Which is worse? Too many words or too few words? Or is a combined 40,000 words between the average man and woman OK, regardless of the division?

This column is 500 words, so only 18,070 left for me. Which is cool and whatnot.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

Curry and then who else? Ranking the Bay Area's top athletes

We live in a wonderland of professional sports figures.

Even after the heartbreaking departures of the A's and Raiders, the Bay Area is the envy of most of the sports world, due to the fact that our major pro sports teams (for purposes of this exersise, we mean the Giants, 49ers, Warriors and Sharks) all consistently make serious efforts to win.

That's not true everywhere (and wasn't true when the A's were still here).

Beyond that, consider the number of charismatic stars who have played here (Willie Mays, Joe Montana, Rickey Henderson, Barry Bonds, Rick Barry), and you realize this region has a wealth of great sports figures.

But who are the best? Over the years, I've done this exercise many times, going back 15 years. Curiously, only three people have topped the list (Tim Lincecum, Buster Posey and Stephen Curry), but dozens of stars have been part of the top 10.

There's no science to this, just art (by which I mean don't blame me if I forgot your favorite person). Here are the current top 10 figures in Bay Area sports:

10. Matt Chapman, Giants. He's the type of athlete who you don't appreciate until he's on your team: He's steady, spectacular at times, but generally a really good grinder. Chapman is like the student who isn't the best in any class, but at the end of the year, she has a 4.0 grade point average.

9. Macklin Celebrini, Sharks. He was the first pick in the 2024 NHL draft and had a solid rookie season at age 18 (he was born in 2006!). Celebrini is positioned to become the Sharks' biggest-ever star, due to his early standing in the league and how things appear to be set to build the franchise around him. Bonus points: His name is familiar because his father is the Warriors director of sports medicine and performance..

8. Logan Webb, Giants. He's not the longest-serving Giants player (that's Mike Yastrzemski), but he's been the starting pitcher four consecutive years and has led the National League in innings pitched for each of the past two season. He's old-school in the best way possible.

7. Christian McCaffrey, 49ers. A unicorn in the NFL – a great running back who could be a great wide receiver if needed and maybe could play quarterback in an emergency. McCaffery was injured most of last year, so he's slipped on this list, but if he returns at anywhere close to the standard he's set in eight NFL seasons, he's a top-three NFL running back. Bonus points: He attended Stanford.

6. Fred Warner, 49ers. He's charismatic, he's fast, he's strong and he's a willing leader on the Bay Area's favorite sports team. Warner does everything at full speed and for those rare times when he's off the field (he plays injured), there's a huge dropoff.

5. Draymond Green, Warriors. The best defensive player of his generation, a four-time NBA champion and the emotional spark for the Warriors (often for good, sometimes for bad). Green is wrapping up his 13th season with the franchise, something that only 25 NBA players have ever surpassed (including Steph Curry, with 15 seasons) and is the bad cop to Curry's good cop on the national stage.

4. Nick Bosa, 49ers. One of the best pass-rushers in the NFL, he's the most famous defensive player on the Niners (not the best. That's Warner). There's a reason the team buckled and gave him a huge contract two years ago – players with his skill set are rare. And he's just 27.

3. Buster Posey, Giants. While a player, he was consistenly near the top of this list. Now he's the team's top executive (he's not yet 40!) and is the most famous member of the franchise (next on the list are broadcasters Duane Kuiper and Mike Krukow). Giants fans trust him to rebuild the franchise and it will take some significant failure to diminish that confidence.

2. Brock Purdy, 49ers. It's an automatic that the quarterback of the 49ers – by far the most popular sports team in the Bay Area – is one of the most important sports figures in the region. That's true if it's Joe Montana, Steve Young, Tim Rattay or Alex Smith. It's particularly true for Purdy, famously the last pick of the draft, who led the team to the NFC Championship game in his first two seasons (going to the Super Bowl in the second of those years).

1. Stephen Curry. His star power is obvious now, but when drafted in 2009, Curry joined a franchise that had one playoff appearance in 15 years – and proceeded to miss the playoffs the next three seasons. That he's seen as the greatest shooter and one of the greatest winners in NBA history is remarkable. That's he's a perfect "face of the franchise" for a team that is one of the glamor franchises in sports is a tribute to Curry and his teammates.

Reach Brad Stanhope at Bradstanhope@outlook.com.

'What a Show!' – Americans Split on View of Middle Ages

The Middle Ages have an image problem.

By that, I don't mean your 50s and 60s, which some people (who apparently think we live to 120) call middle-aged. I mean the real European Middle Ages, the era of knights and castles and plagues and the Crusades and bathing once a month and the Inquisition ("What a show!" as sung in "History of the World, Part I," the Mel Brooks movie where I learned most of what I know about history).

We don't love the Middle Ages. We don't hate them, either.

A recent YouGov survey showed that 34% of Americans have very or somewhat favorable views of the Middle Ages and the same percentage have very or somewhat negative views. Americans are split on everything (who should be president, whether the designated hitter is a good idea, whether frying beats flame-broiling and whether the Middle Ages was a good time). 

It's remarkable that such a high percentage of people have a favorable view of a period when life expectancy was about 35 years, when less than 20% of people could read and when almost no one had a car or TV. But the other things – chivalry, cool architecture (of famous places, not the homes of those illiterate people who somehow lived to their 40s), the Vikings (they won much more than the modern football team does) – have cache with people.

This is all complicated by the definition of "Middle Ages," although I wouldn't want to live in any version of the times mentioned. The survey-takers asked about the Dark Ages, Late Antiquity and Classical Antiquity. It's really different ways to define the period from about 500 until about 1600 or so. There's nuance on the question of which period includes, for instance, the invention of the printing press. Or when Marco Polo lived. There's an even deeper question of whether it's OK to open your eyes during a game of Marco Polo if you're in water over your head and you're getting nervous about drowning.

But enough about water sports. This is about our view of the Middle Ages. Quit trying to distract me.

Those who took the survey were as divided on the definition of the Middle Ages as they are on the question of Pepsi vs. Coke. A majority considered Columbus' journey to the Americas and Martin Luther writing his Ninety-Five Theses as being post-Middle Ages, while also believing that King Henry VIII annulling his marriage to Catherine of Aragon (which happened after both of the preceding events) was during the Middle Ages.

Maybe they just thought Henry (who was 42 at that time) was in his middle ages. Or maybe, like me, they had no idea about Henry VIII, other than the silly 1965 song by Herman's Hermits, which isn't about the king after all. Most of that ignorance is also likely due to the fact that it wasn't covered in "History of the World Part I," I guess.

We're split on our views of what we think of the Middle Ages, we're split on when they happened, we're split on whether you can open your eyes in Marco Polo to avoid the threat of drowning, but we have some consensus on specifics. 

Most of us dislike the Black Plague and the Hundred Years War. Most of us like castles and chivalry.

But looking closer at the numbers brings some further troubling data. For instance, 73% of people have a negative view of the Black Plague, which killed between 30% and 50% of Europeans. But 9% of people have a positive view of it.

What? Who has a positive view of the Black Plague?

Similarly, 16% of people have a positive view of the Inquisition. I hope the Black Plague fans are just an extreme subset of the Inquisition fans ("Here we go!"), rather than a different group. We're in trouble if 25% of people have a favorable view of one of those events.

Ultimately, our view of the Middle Ages is confused. Movies about the era aren't about people starving to death at age 8. They're not about losing two-thirds of the people in your village to the Black Plague, which you attribute to some sinister spirits. They're not about people freaking out because they're afraid they'll drown in a swimming pool because no one told them there was an exception to the "keep your eyes closed" rule when you're "it."

That's my conclusion: We have a mixed view of the European Middle Ages because we don't know much about them. Maybe that's generous -- not judging something we don't know. Maybe it's ignorance -- thinking things used to be great because we only watch movies about people who have it good.

Or maybe it's just because everyone didn't have the privilege of watching "History of the World Part I," where we learned about the Inquisition, stand-up philosophers and "The 15 Commandments."

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.