This is a clip from the hit TV series,
"Parks and Recreation."
...128 ounce option.
Most people call it a gallon, but they
call it the regular. Now let's see what
that same clip would be like if we added
a laugh track.
[rewind sound] ...128 ounce option.
[laughter] Most people call it a
gallon, [laughter] but they call it the regular. [laughter]
It seems so wrong, but for most of
television history, it was so right. [background laughter]
Over the last half century or so almost every
comedy on television had canned laughter,
from "I Love Lucy"
to "The Big Bang Theory."
For some, the laughter is viewed as an
imposition. For others, a secondary
character you almost forgot was there,
until it wasn't anymore.
In recent years, the
laugh track has been used less and
less as sitcoms in general have
decreased in popularity. Let's break down
where the mysterious laugh box came from
and where it went.
Before television existed,
there was the ballet, the opera,
magic and comedy shows.
When you went to one of
these events, you were
experiencing the audience reactions in
real time. If something was shocking,
you could hear and feel the gasps echo
around you and similarly with laughter.
But then came the radio, the first ever
broadcast medium. Those communal
reactions disappeared as American
families gathered in their living rooms
to be entertained. Radio producers wanted
to develop a way to give people the live
experience at home. The first-ever laugh
track began with Bing Crosby's radio show.
Recording pioneer Jack Mullen
recalls the creation to "Channels of
Communication," a trade journal in 1981.
"The hillbilly comic Bob Burns was on the
show one time and through a few of his
then extremely racy and off-color folksy
farm stories into the show. We recorded
it live and they all got enormous laughs,
but we couldn't use the jokes. So
scriptwriter Bill Morrow asked us to
save the laughs. A couple of weeks later he
had a show that wasn't very funny and he
insisted that we put in the salvage laughs.
Thus the laugh track was born.
Fast forward to the era of early television.
Comedies were filmed with a single
camera in front of a live audience.
That meant that each scene would be filmed
multiple times from multiple angles,
instead of the multi cams today, which
have multiple cameras capturing one take.
Those separate angles and takes would be
cut together and when that happened, the
laughter was inconsistent.
Audiences would laugh at the
wrong time, too loudly,
for too long and were simply unreliable.
In the late 1940s, CBS sound engineer
Charlie Douglas noticed those
inconsistencies and couldn't take it
anymore. If a joke didn't get a desired
laugh, he would insert one with the use
of a laugh track. This technique became
known as "sweetening." Douglass went so far
as to create a physical laugh box.
According to Ron Simon, curator of
television and radio at the Paley Center
for Media, the device was about three
feet tall, the shape of a filing cabinet,
very heavy and had slots for 32 reels,
which could hold ten laughs each. It was
officially named the audience response
duplicator, but it became known as the
"laugh box." At its best,
the "laugh box" could hold 320
laughs. Press them one at a time
and you get a similar laugh. [single laugh]
Press multiple keys at once [laughter] and a symphony of
laughter would play. Each key represented
a different age, sex, and style of laugh,
with a foot pedal regulating the way.
The "laugh box" was mysterious though.
Since Douglas owned the patent and
created all of them, nobody outside of
him and his family members had ever seen
the inside of the machine. And when
Douglas wasn't around, the machine was
kept tightly padlocked. In an interview
with "TV Guide" in 1966, Dick Hobson said
if the laugh box should start acting
strangely, the laugh boys
wheel it into the men's room,
locking the door behind them so no
one can peek. I mentioned the name
Charlie Douglas and it's like Cosa
Nostra, everybody starts whispering.
It's the most taboo topic in TV. The first sitcom to
use the "laugh box" was the
short-lived series, "The Hank McCune Show"
in 1950. [laughter on show] The idea of recorded laughter
spread throughout Hollywood and by the
1960s almost every single cameras sitcom
was utilizing canned laughter. But it was
only Douglas that engineered the
laughing for everyone for almost a
decade. For $100 Douglas would wheel the
mysterious box to each studio on a dolly
and sit with the producers in a
screening room and decide what kind of
laughter and when. Eventually Douglas
hired a second-in-command to keep up
with the 100 hours of television he
needed to sweeten. And the rest was
history. Multicam sitcoms were
popularized in shows like "Friends,"
"Frasier," "Seinfeld" and
more incorporated canned laughter. [Sound of "Friends" in the background]
The actors and actresses would know to
hold for laughter, knowing that each
scene would be sweetened. [more sound from "Friends"] The Discovery
Channel documentary, the one that goes
behind the scenes, shows how it works.
[Sometimes the audience responds too big.]
If I went with the actual laugh, [laughter]that laugh
is still going through her next line
into his next reaction and that's, it's
five, six seconds. And in TV land that's
an eternity. [laughter] [Sometimes we have to put in
a laughter that is shorter.]
It felt like comedies would be
like this forever. And then "The
Big Bang Theory" went off the air in 2019
and took with it one of the last
multicam sitcoms with canned laughter.
When we look at the television landscape
today almost, every single comedy is a
single-camera comedy and not a multicam
sitcom with canned laughter. You can
count on two hands how many multicam
sitcoms that use a laugh track are on TV
right now, and not to
mention those that went off
the air this year [2020]. The use of the laugh
track has almost disappeared completely
from the TV lineup. So what changed?
Dead air in television used to be frowned upon
and shows would push for laugh
tracks whenever possible. [distant laugh track]
Bill Cosby claimed his first sitcom, "The
Bill Cosby Show," that ran from 1961 to
1971, failed because he had insisted on
not using a laugh track. Not to be
confused with the very successful "The
Cosby Show" that aired in the 1980s and
did have a laugh track. And "MASH" fought
to not have a laugh track at all, but
they came to a compromise with the
studio. They would use the canned
laughter, but just not during the very
serious OR scenes. While we associate
the 80s and the 90s with the laugh track,
that was actually the time when single
camera comedies without canned laughter
started to take over. A key player in this
transition was HBO. Their show's
"Dream On" in 1990 and "The Larry Sanders
Show" in 1992 ran without laughs tracks
and even garnered praise for doing so.
The airing of these shows proved that
comedies could exist, and exist
successfully without laugh tracks. Other
studios took notice and
began to follow suit.
Then came "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "Malcolm
in the Middle," "Scrubs,"
"Arrested Development," "It's Always Sunny
in Philadelphia," "30 Rock," "The Office" and
the list goes on and on.
Writers and producers were excited by
the change, as it allowed them to stray
from the constant stream of punchlines
to explore character based humor. Another
reason the laugh track fell to the
wayside? According to Mike Royce the
co-showrunner of Netflix's "One Day at a Time,"
"I think one of the reasons why
people don't like laugh tracks is they
don't like to be told how to react. It's
an American thing: Don't tell me what the
[bleep] to laugh at." "T"he Big Bang Theory was
one of the last big sitcoms that used
canned laughter and even their creator
Chuck Lorre insisted that absolutely no
sweetening took place on any of his
series, which also include "Two and a Half
Men"" and Mike and Molly," stating "I do not
and have never, sweetened my shows with
fake laughs. I've always thought it was
pretty hateful and a self-defeating practice."
For now, the laugh track lives
in a very strange state. It's used in
very few shows, but lives on in the
reruns of ever popular series like
"Friends," "How I Met Your Mother," and more.
Perhaps history might repeat itself
and we'll see a resurgence in multicam
sitcoms and the laugh track.
Until then, we can thank streaming
services like Netflix and Hulu for
keeping Charlie Douglass's legacy in our
living rooms. Thank you for watching.
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