LONG BEACH —The silence is deafening. On a typical day, this warehouse along the bay churns out the stuff sit-coms are made of: laughs. And lots of them. But with a strike by Laughter Canning Local No. 839 looming over the holiday season, and an intentional slowdown currently in effect, this holiday season has more the makings of a really bad joke on Hollywood.

 Canners are upset over work conditions, long recognized as the worst in the entertainment industry. The Long Beach facility alone provides a third of the laughter output for the major T.V. networks. Other local canneries, in Santa Ana, Burbank and Encino, are expected to join the labor union's strike.

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"It's a sad-but-true fact. A few years back, the networks commissioned a joint study that revealed how, without the canned laughter, 3 out of 5 Americans couldn't recognize a good joke."

 —Jay Goulding, Network Executive

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"For positions that symbolize humor within the biz," says canning production manager Dina Martinez, "it's just not funny. It's dark and dank on the production line… my people are overworked… some get hurt… no one smiles – it's no wonder they're at the end of their collective bargaining rope."

If the strike moves forward, the effect on the networks could be even more devastating than during the legendary 1986 canning strikes, when it was not uncommon to see sit-coms entirely devoid of laugh tracks. These are still generally referred to in the biz as "the Dark Days of Sit-com," when ratings plummeted and heads rolled. Among avid sit-com viewers nationwide, there was a noticeable spike in reported cases of depression.

"People who watch a lot of T.V. don't know how to really laugh," admits NBC network executive, Jay Goulding, "it's a sad-but-true fact. A few years back, the networks commissioned a joint study that revealed how, without the canned laughter, 3 out of 5 Americans couldn't recognize a good joke. So it's not like the networks don't realize the importance of the canners' jobs. But I'm hopeful it can be worked out."

 In a normal production process, laughter begins on the studio lots, where audiences are shipped in and, prodded by comedians, the audience learns to laugh repeatedly at the same jokes and gags. The actors run the scenes until the director and producers are satisfied. The laugh track is then skimmed from the visuals and farmed out to the canning facilities. The laughs are manipulated, categorized into different types of humor, canned, and sent back to the studios to re-insert into their shows.

 Sociologist, Cindy Pettengail, wrote To Laugh or Not to Laugh and coined the term "laughter inhibition" to describe what she sees as a larger trend in America. "I believe that what we're seeing isn't a mere coincidence. I think it's the zeitgeist, a case of real synchronicity, but I also think it goes way back. Maybe it's a lingering Puritan thing. What we're seeing is a very real loss of humor among the American populace. It's true, we live in heavy times and many people find it hard to be light-hearted in our current world predicament of terrorism, war, famine, political corruption and general abuse of power. It's definitely different. Years ago, if a person was walking down the street and slipped on a banana, people would laugh; now they just sue."