Gelbart said that a cast member cracking up “seems to be a signal to the audience,” presumably pushing them to laugh whether or not they actually want to. This take is pretty in line with Gelbart’s ethos as a storyteller, as the writer also went on the record more than once to talk about how much he loathed the show’s laugh track. “I always thought it cheapened the show. I always thought it was out of character with the show,” he once told the Archive of American Television. When it came to Rogers, though, Gelbart said the late actor’s laughter was totally authentic, and that his and other characters’ in-show reactions could make audiences laugh “far more than because of a laugh track.”
“It was genuine,” he explained in Solomonson’s book, in reference to Rogers. “Wayne’s a pushover. I see Wayne at a party, he starts laughing across the room. I don’t know if he’s remembering something we did, or if he’s anticipating what’s possibly going to be said.” That quick-to-laugh attitude makes Trapper one of the show’s most winsome characters, and some of the best scenes in the show’s first three seasons (Rogers left after the third) feature him and Alda hamming it up with open-mouthed peals of laughter, sometimes accompanied by an honest-to-god knee slap. Oftentimes, the laughter was clearly written into the script, meant to convey the pair’s borderline manic response to the chaos of wartime. In the face of so much carnage, the show often reminded us that sometimes all Hawkeye and Trapper could do was laugh.