Of course it's awkward. The timing is still left in their for the laughs to happen but replaced with silence. It's like blanking all the comments out of source code and then complaining that it uses whitespace awkwardly.

Jokes on you, my code still looks exactly the same!

Very true. Having not really watched the show before, though, I'm really curious what that scene is like with the laugh track still in. They pause so frequently, I wonder if it would still be a little hard to follow?