Paid Audience Members?

[Nutz]

The audience is made up of VIPs (usually friends of the cast and staff, agents, etc) the rest of the audience is provided by audience participation company's such as Audience Unlimited. The audience "soundtrack" can be taken from anything once you get in the studio. Usually they have the audience watch a clip show of "funny" moments from the show, they watch a completed episode from a recent taping, they have a comedian in the audience to keep people laughing while they set up the next shot or need to do rewrites. Plus of course the live taping of the the episode scenes. (At least this was how they handled it when I still went to tapings)