Can audience/laugh tracks be removed from a modern sitcom?

Question

I found some attempts to show a modern sitcom without the "audience" laughter, and was surprised they were done by hand muting the entire audio.

Is there no automated way to remove a laugh track from a video?

I was thinking that even if there’s a live audience the sound techs would want it mic’d separately so they could dial it and “sweeten” it in post, and that any self-respecting audio engineer would want to put at least some of the laugh track on the back channels of a surround encoding. So that could be referenced to strip the audience out (the same way some karaoke machines strip vocals by removing the signals that are equal on both stereo channels). But I don't have ready means to determine whether my assumptions correspond to reality.

Answer 1

This isn't post-pro, this is reverse-engineering.

In post it would be extremely easy [barring some spill into the actors' mics].
From a commercially available release your only chance would be if the laugh track was exclusively in the surround with nothing of it in the centre channel.

BTW, the 'karaoke mic' thing is often barely good enough for even karaoke.