Does Craig Ferguson really have a live studio audience?
It’s definitely filmed in front of a live studio audience. Amazingly, I was in the studio audience the same afternoon that this thread appeared. Here’s a clip of the show from the night I was there — and yes, I can be briefly seen in it — in which Craig comes out shaking his fist at the audience, and in which the entire scope of the (fairly small) studio is shown. Completely real. Those clips don’t seem to be “sweetened” with an additional laugh track as far as I can tell — there’s lots of real laughter from the audience. I think it’s just that Ferguson has the most aggressive, hardest-working audience prep people in the business. When you’re waiting in the waiting area to be escorted up to the studio, one of the producers comes down, and gives a spiel that goes kind of like this: “I don’t want you here if you’re in a bad mood. If you had
