The laughter track is integral to television culture, and an odd part of modern life. Fake laughter sounds are regularly added to comedy television shows, as if such a thing were normal. As if the engineered laughter is the clincher to the viewer that proves the writers wrote a good script. As if the audience merely need signals to know when to laugh. Nowadays the best way to escape the laughter track is to not watch television, though who knows, it might still appear on radio comedies. How did this small part of mass media engineering, others are available, become quite so universal? And why?
The earliest laugh tracks were used when radio was the dominant mass broadcasting medium. Since recording tape was so rare then nearly all radio shows from the 1920’s-1940’s were performed live and in front of an audience. Any limits in the laughter and applause of the audience were natural and accepted as an unavoidable part of the broadcast. But with the advent of tape an occasional laughter track was added live to a radio broadcast to cover when an audience responded differently to a joke than the producer of the show expected. When television became the dominant mass medium, in the 1950’s, like radio had been before television was performed live. And television was performed live for the same reasons radio had been-lack of recording technology. The laughter that was broadcast was as live as the programme was, however cheap it seemed at the time and might seem even more since.
But broadcasters feared jokes being fluffed or falling flat, leaving an awkward silence with poor visuals. It might scare the shows sponsors-vital for the programme to run. At other times very loud audience laughter could cause the sound of the speaker of the viewers television set to distort. In the very early 1950’s a CBS sound engineer named Charley Douglass developed a solution to the problem with a technique he called “sweetening”. By using pre-recorded laughter sounds Douglass could enhance the applause of an audience when a joke fell flat and mute the laughter of an audience when it threatened the rhythm of the script. In 1953, Douglass invented his “laff box”, a machine which resembled a typewriter and could recreate various pre-recorded applause and laughter sounds at various lengths, volumes, and pitches with the stroke of a key. Douglass kept his technology a close secret. This gave him a near monopoly over “sweetening”. By the end of the decade he was paid by almost every American broadcasting company to sweeten almost every comedy show on the air.
By the start of the 60’s, fewer shows were aired with a live audience. It became easier and cheaper, and sometimes better, to pre-record shows instead. But nervous TV producers still believed that it was necessary to falsely create the atmosphere of a live show with a pretend live audience. So editors and sound engineers added pre-recorded laughter and applause to recordings post production. Writers and directors eventually joined n the process and wrote words for the creation of false response with a setup, a punch line, and a lengthy pause where the fake response would be added. This method permeated even cartoons and children’s shows. Look up 1960’s episodes of The Flintstones and Top Cat. There the fake audience are, forever.
In 1965 CBS tested how necessary the laugh track was by previewing the pilot episode of the World War II comedy “Hogan’s Heroes” to test multiple audiences. In one version a laugh track was used in the other there was just the actors in the studio. The results were that the version with a laugh track scored highly with viewers, the version without scored low ratings. The test was not scientific, the audience used for the test were familiar with laughter tracks, whether they were aware of the mechanics of them, and the reasons they were used, or not. Finding an audience who were not familiar with laughter tracks would have been difficult for CBS. As a result, in 1965 CBS began airing all of their comedy shows with laugh tracks. In no time at all other broadcasters were doing the same. And Douglass had refined his technology to creating whole diverse laugh tracks for entire shows. he maintained his monopoly over the laugh track business until the 1970’s, when eventually competitors developed their own laugh track technologies. M*A*S*H created in 1970 or so by Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds did not want a laugh track due to the cerebral and often serious nature of the show. However CBS required them to. So they used a laugh track but used a subdued “audience” and used it as lightly as possible. In the 1980’s many shows air episodes without laugh track, led by the M*A*S*H example.
Today television shows that lack laugh tracks can find their place in the schedules, but the fake laugh track humour still dominates the comedy and sitcom output of every American popular television network.
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