Why Sitcoms Stopped Using Laugh Tracks - Cheddar Explains

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, [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,
[laughter]

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. [laughter]

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."
Douglas 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 laughs] 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 length. [laughter]

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 camera 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.]
[laughter]

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, [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 shows

"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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[music ends]