Laugh tracks have been around since the early 1950s and it’s all thanks to one (reviled) sound engineer who invented them. But as much as people like to hate laugh tracks most shows wouldn’t be at all funny without them.
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's chuck and this is short stuff, a very special sandwich edition between our very special two part episode on Sitcoms. Right, chuck, Insert Laugh track, Jerry. That's right, nicely done, Jerry. So Um, we're talking about laugh tracks. Everybody knows what a laugh track is. It's also sometimes called canned laughter and if you didn't realize that a lot of the sitcoms that you watch have laughter added in, well prepared to have your socks knocked off, because that is the thing and it's been around for seventies, seventy years a little over. Yeah, and it's a really cool story, uh, and that they discovered there was a problem early on with live studio audiences and that sometimes they laughed at the wrong time, sometimes they didn't laugh at all, sometimes they laughed too loudly and for too long, and they had a laughter problem because people are stupid. And so, UH CBS sound engineer named Charlie Douglas said, you know what, I think I can crack this thing. They've been using laugh tracks and radio forever. Um. Why don't I see if I can put together a library of of laughter and use that to augment the laughter and sometimes entirely, entirely replaced the laughter of the real audience. Yeah. So, so Charlie Douglas started recording actual people laughing, and you can't like you have to be pretty selective when you're recording laughter because there's a lot of times where people are talking or actors are giving dialogue. Still. So Red Skelton had a show and he was a very famous, very physical comedic actor. He could go long stretches just entertaining people without saying a word. So he was a natural source of this Um laughter that Charlie Douglas went around and recorded. So was the mime Marcel Marceau, and so he started recording any kind of laughter. He didn't he put it all together, splice tapes together, and his first attempt at a very rudimentary attempt at a laugh track made his debut in nineteen fifty on a show I've never heard of before, chuck, the Hank mccune show, of you. Nope, never heard of it, but it's it's historic in that it was the first show that the laugh track debuted on. That's right. Uh, and Douglas got pretty into this. Uh, to put it lightly. He kind of obsessed, it seemed, over getting these laugh tracks just right. I don't think he was happy with just saying like, all right, we got some canned laughter, we got a couple of versions, let's just go with it, uh, and ended up getting sort of being like a conductor slash magician, and that he had all different kinds. I think he ended up with about three and twenty different kinds of laughs, from uproarious to like just a little bit, to a few people tittering to it rising and falling like a symphony. And the coolest thing about all of this is he did this and and put it in a literal physical machine right, actual like. It ended up being called the laugh box, although he tried to call it the audience response duplicator or, if you I could totally see in the fifties, pretending it's a robot and calling it R D. Yeah, and also audience response duplicator is a pretty good band name. I want to think about it. Now. What kind of music exactly? I don't know. That's your's special I go to math rock every time. I don't know what that would be. But yeah, so this this box, the laugh box, it was about the size and shape of a filing cabinet, well, a three FT tall filing cabinet, or one meter for friends outside of the US. Um and it was made by Charlie Douglas himself from like household appliances, um parts from an organ that he stripped, uh, and vacuum tubes and it was really heavy, but it was really really effective. Like you said, it had all sorts of different laughs of all types on it. I think it could hold up to three hundred and twenty different laughs. And again, this is nineteen fifty and this guy basically created a laughing computer. Yeah, there were thirty two reels, ten laughs each, and it had, like you said, it had these it looked more like these giant typewriter keys to me as far as like literally how you would engage it, and but you could play it almost like an instrument, and that it wasn't just hit one button. You could hit a combination of buttons if you wanna get a very specific kind of laughter. I had no idea this is how this worked. I just thought it was all done in post by just kind of splicing it together, uh, with like, you know, hey, just put track one on there or something like that. I had no idea it was a literal machine. It's very, very cool. Yeah, and and Um, one of my favorites of all time is the one person lightly laughing at a time. Yeah, that was really used to great effect in Scooby Doo. If you think back, like there was very often times when just one person was kind of like, was that on a laugh track? Uh Yeah, yes, it was, because the scooby Doo animated characters were not performing live in front of a studio audience. Well, I know that. I don't remember there being laughter on Scooby Doo. Oh, yeah, totally. Anytime Scooby or shaggy, did you know built like a seven foot sandwich, there was a laugh track. Exactly that would have gotten a laugh track. I haven't seen it a long time. I'm sure it's totally full of laughter, but I just don't remember. It really holds up, man, does it really? Yes, especially the original one from like nine nine. All right, well, let's take a break. I'M gonna go watch some of those and we'll be back to talk about how laugh tracks were received right after this. All right. Did People like laugh tracks? No, yes and no. Studio executives a lot of them loved it because it solved a big problem, but it seems like almost exclusively outside the studio executives, most people weren't too keen on it. No, and I mean like this started right out of the gate. Um the laugh check was derided as phony or Corny or whatever, and Charlie Douglass, the inventor of that laugh box, the guy who originated this, he became, I don't want to say a recluse, but as far as the media was concerned, you could not get an interview out of him because I don't know if he took it personally or took it hard or just to want to put himself out there. But he, as far as I could tell, he got very wealthy off of this thing. Between the fifties and the seventies, if you heard a laft track in a show, it was from Charlie Douglas. Yeah, I bet you anything. He was hurt because, I mean there were people that said, like this has ruined television in some cases. Yeah, like an auto tune Kinda. Yeah, he invented auto tune too. Not many people know that. Right, he did it at all. He ruined everything and the sound of airplane toilets flushing. Oh Wow, that's a good one, especially if you're playing one person lightly laughing over the air airplane toilet flushing. I still can't believe they haven't solved that yet. Uh Yeah, I know, because and now everybody, like everyone, look over at the door. I'm about to come out. It's terrible and I plugged my ears. It's just so grating and uh, in your face. Anyway. So in the seventies is when the laugh track Um kind of hit its heyday, along with the heyday, as you have now learned in our Sitcom's episode of the Live Studio Audience Multi camera taped show. But it was also the time when it became sort of more of a object of scorn. So that's when you started hearing the famous announcement film before live studio audience just to let people know like, uh, maybe we use some can laughter, but there are also real people here laughing. Yeah, it was a boast. I had no idea why they said that, but it was almost like a disclaimer the way they said but really they were telling you, like the laughter you're hearing is is human laughter, like genuine stuff, and those were we're filmed in front of studio audiences. The ones that are weird are the shows like Mash that we're not filmed in front of a studio audience. But there was still that laugh track, but you never thought about it. You were just so used to it. It's very weird, especially if you stop and think about laugh tracks. We'll get into that in a second, but it is a very weird concept the way it supplied. But Um, I saw that almost went away as early as the mid sixties, that some CBS studio executives tested uh, the pilot of Hogan's heroes with a laugh track with one focus group without a laugh track with another focus group, or maybe the same focus group, I don't know, but the focus group chose the laugh track episode, of the Laugh Track version, and that just cemented laugh tracks for decades to come. You can thank that one focus group for it. Yeah, interesting pick for the show to do that with. I think like it was interesting enough to have a Sitcom about uh PO WS and Nazis. I love the show. That's pretty good. As a kid thoughts heroes is great, but Um, yeah, the laugh track is weird and it's even weirder when you think about animated sitcoms. We talked about the flint stones. I believe that will be coming up in part two of the sitcoms up. But Flint stones and the Jetson's they had laugh tracks two, which doesn't make any sense at all, but people just bought it because they were used to it. Yeah, exactly. It's you just don't even notice it unless you notice it, and then once you notice it it's hard to stop. But, like you said, even mash had one and apparently the creator, Larry Gilbert, said he wanted mash to air without laughs, quote, just like the actual Korean War. Um, but he still lost. But they gave him the out to not have a laugh track during the medical like surgery scenes. Yeah, it all kind of flowed though I never really noticed that stuff, like when they were in the O R, that there wasn't a laugh track going. Generally right. Uh. In other countries they have done some interesting things. It's kind of a very American slash UK thing, but in Latin America apparently they would actually hire laughers to come in like professional laughers Rayo doors and they would say laugh at this moment and that moment, and I don't know if it was like that. They were just plants in the audience that we're supposed to laugh to get everybody else laughing, or the entire audience were made of ray a door. So I'm not sure. But either way I guess they issued the laugh track. Generally, I think it was probably multiple plants to get people going because, uh, they have done, Um, I guess, studies, but they have shown that laugh tracks people find things funnier when other people are laughing so aterly, when there as can laughter, people are more apt to think something is funny. Yeah, fifteen to twenty percent funnier when you add can't laughter to it, which is that's funny in and of itself. This is fifteen funnier. That's Hilarious to me. How do you how do you measure that? So, if you think back, even Seinfeldt Chuck, one of the funniest shows of all time, had a laugh track, and this was into the nineties, right. The Simpsons managed to launch with that one. They never had a laugh track. I don't think they even jokingly used one. Um. But my point is even Seinfeld, up into the nineties, had one and it wasn't until I saw the U K's version of the office credited as the one that really turned the tide. I think the HITCHHIKER's guide to the galaxy in the UK. Um really broke out and said we're not going to use this, but it was still used extensively. It wasn't until the office came along and just change comedy. The comedy involved was presented and written in a way that a las check just would not make sense because it was so cringe e. You know. Yeah, I mean it's hard to imagine something like either version of the office or arrested development or thirty rock or curb your enthusiasm with a laugh track. It would be very strange. Uh. And speaking of strange, one of the most fun things you can do is just spend a few minutes of your day watching Um sitcoms without the laugh track, like classic sitcoms. Uh. They've notably done this on youtube with episodes of friends and clips of friends and it's just weirdly disconcerting. Uh. It's not as funny and one of the weirdest things is know, you don't realize that when you're watching a show with a laugh track, but they're like a stage play. They're waiting for a beat while the people are laughing to stay their next line, and it's never more apparent than when that laughter is gone. It's very disjointed and weird because it's just silent, right. But then also without the laugh track, I think you are very, very generous to say it's just not as funny. Um, I found it like not funny at all and actually kind of upsetting, to tell you the truth. Like they're the jokes are like deeply juvenile. They're supported every single one by like a funny facial expression that's not actually funny. It looks kind of hostile instead, and you it becomes clear that, friends, is like in no way funny on its own. It like really leaned on the laugh track to make it funny. Did you see the one, uh Ross, without laugh track psychopaths? Now I know what I will be doing right after we finished recording. Yeah, check it out, because not only did they remove the laugh track for the scene, but they they made it. They changed the color so where it was black and white, and they put like this brooding music. It's really, really good. Um. And while we're at just this general thing, also should just recommend music lists, music videos. Yeah, those, those are great. Those are some of the funniest things on Youtube when it just shows like people dancing around with like sneaker squeaks and then going like all good stuff. Um, the opposite is pretty funny too, where you take something that's not intended to be funny and add a laugh track, like way before space coast coast to coast. I don't know if it was the same friends of ours, Dave Willis, who did this too, but somebody put like old episodes of space ghost from the sixties on cartoon network at night, even before adults swim, and just added laugh tracks so like inappropriate places and made it like genuinely funny. I would like to say I wonder if anyone's done that with like the office. I'd be curious just to see what that feels like. Yeah, yeah, I'm just gonna go spend the rest of the day on the Internet watching this stuff. I think I agree. All right. Well, chuck agreed. I said I was gonna go do something else. That means short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of I heart radio. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the I heart radio APP, apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,