Laughter or music?

If this course has taught me anything its that music is everywhere, invading all manners of our daily lives, thousands of times a day with varying degrees of annoyance, taste and decency. The buses have radios on them that plays terrible music only to go to ads so we can be subjected to that new radio jingle for cracked windscreens (I bet all of you could sing it as well).

So I was struck with the silence yesterday when I watched Friends in a work break. I haven't seen this show for years and I realised something very important of all sit com's, there is no music when people are speaking. While there is the obligatory theme song (you could all sing that as well, we used to in school) and the 'transitional' music (Seinfeild had some great bass in there), there is nothing while the characters are speaking to assist in these amazingly witty one liners and deep and meaningful story lines.

Why is this? Could we replace the canned laughter with some music and let the characters tell an equally funny story, or is a sitcom never anything but talking heads and dead peoples laughter? It's obviously a style thing that is replicated everywhere I look, Black Books has the same situation but I always liked that show.

It raises another question for me of the importance of music in film/tv for portraying these 'moods' we have spoken of so highly. These shows use 22 minutes of silence to tell a story, while a film tells something, albeit deeper, in 91 mins plus. I always thought music assisted the story in some magical way that I never quite knew, now I'm not so sure, and see it as a system of drawing out boring scenes and filling peoples heads with intended readings for complicated scenes or themes.