This is the first thing that came to mind for me as well. Have always loved how mean everyone seems without the canned laughter to tell us "hey, this is funny!"
You won't find me defending The Big Bang Theory, but it's worth noting a lot of actually funny television would have this kind of dead energy if you removed the laugh track, because it's both written for that environment and paced and acted for the audience reaction breaks.
True, the awkward long pauses between each beat are there specifically for the laugh track and if they had gone without the track they wouldn't include the pauses either.