Not a teacher, but my mother is a retired professor.

It would absolutely work on a large percentage of students, especially the type that are so lazy they are plugging their assignment into an ai. She retired in 22 and had students that had never used a desktop computer with a mouse and keyboard, only phones, tablets, and ChromeOS laptops. Text formatting, beyond the very basics of bold and colors, were a new concept for them.

I think they are referring to the movie, which (I believe) did not have a laugh track.

If you can find it there was a DVD release of the tv series where the laugh track could be disabled. It’s so much better.