The sporting competitions that the characters would be called upon to perform in would often be comical and offbeat versions of Olympic sports and scavenger hunts. Each segment took place in a different location somewhere on the planet, including excursions to Africa, Italy, Canada, Washington D.C., and even the North Pole. Each episode was presented in a format similar to an Olympic television broadcast, with hosting/announcing duties and color commentary provided by Snagglepuss from The Yogi Bear Show and Mildew Wolf from the It's the Wolf segments of The Cattanooga Cats (though unlike It's the Wolf, Mildew was no longer voiced by Paul Lynde; he is now voiced by John Stephenson). Non-competing Hanna-Barbera characters such as Fred Flintstone, Barney Rubble and Jabberjaw made appearances as guest announcers. Since the show was airing on ABC, Snagglepuss and Mildew wore the then-traditional yellow jackets of ABC Sports announcers.

The Laff-A-Lympics competition was based upon a point system. Various events were worth a certain point total for the first, second, and third place winners (usually 25, 15, and 10 respectively), and the team that had the most points by the end of the half-hour--usually the Scooby Doobies or Yogi Yahooeys--was declared the winner and received the gold medal. Points could also be subtracted for treachery and sabotage, which were the specialties of the villainous Really Rottens team.

As with most Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning cartoons of the 1970s, the basic plot and theme of each episode was mostly generic and repetitive. The two "good guy" teams, the Scooby Doobies and the Yogi Yahooeys, were good friends and their respective team members gladly helped each other whenever they got into a jam. The Really Rottens, however, always cheated and pulled dirty tricks -- and ultimately they would wind up the losers in most episodes. Much like Dick Dastardly typically the Really Rottens would be just on the verge of winning, before they would make a fatal error at the very end that allowed one of the other two teams to end up at the top. Occasionally, though, the Rottens' cheating technique wouldn't actually be against the rules, with them actually winning in a few episodes (there was even one episode where they won through sheer chance). The final episode, climaxing on the moon, was a three-way tie.

Only one complete season of Laff-A-Lympics episodes were produced, with eight new episodes combined with reruns for the second season of Scooby's All-Star Laff-A-Lympics (billed as Scooby's All-Stars). When it premiered in the fall of 1977, the series consisted of several segments, including "Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels" (which led off the two-hour program and later was spun off onto its own half-hour show), "Scooby-Doo" and "Dynomutt" (both of which featured a small number of newly-produced segments alongside repeated segments from earlier seasons) and the "Laff-A-Lympics" segments themselves. The show resurfaced in 1980 as a half-hour series on its own (sans the "Captain Caveman," "Scooby-Doo" and "Dynomutt" cartoons) and titled Scooby's Laff-A-Lympics, and was rerun at various other points during the 1980s on ABC. It has also been frequently re-run in later years as simply Laff-A-Lympics on USA Cartoon Express, Cartoon Network and Boomerang.

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