The Laff Box

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When Paul Iverson was eight years old, he would come home from school, turn on the TV, and watch the Pink Panther Show.

It was 1982, and Paul was watching the show in syndication on WGN in Chicago.

Some channels aired versions with a laugh track, and some aired versions without.

I always watched the ones that had the laughter because it was, I guess, as a child, it was communal to me.

I said, oh, there's people watching with me, and they sound like adults.

They don't sound like children.

He loved the show so much that he would tape it, but he didn't have a VCR.

So he would use a tape recorder, one that only captured the sound, even though the Pink Panther show has very little dialogue.

What you've been listening to, that's mostly what the Pink Panther sounds like.

What I was doing was allowing myself to hear the laughs rather than watch the show visually, like watching a show with your eyes closed.

And I basically started studying it.

So, who are these people laughing?

Why are they laughing in the same order as they did last time?

Paul's early encounters with the Pink Panther fostered a lifelong interest in laugh tracks.

Paul lives in LA and works as an account manager at an insurance company, but he's a passionate laugh track hobbyist.

Paul taught himself everything about laugh tracks, how they're made, who made them, the difference between them, even how to make them for himself.

The Monkeys is a great show to think of because they killed the laugh track halfway through the second season.

One of my goals in life is to re-ad the laugh track and and not just add it, but try to add it as it was during that season using those same laughs.

It's really a very strange obsession because there's so few people you can tell it to, but I love recreating them.

I love isolating these clips and putting them on anything I possibly can.

One of the shows that Paul tinkered around with is the ABC sitcom Modern Family.

It doesn't have a laugh track, so Paul gave it one.

I've just never had a teacher not like me before.

Well, Miss Davis.

Please, she's a gym teacher.

She is to teaching what Dr.

Seuss is to medicine.

But to think she didn't like you.

Modern Family premiered in 2009.

But if it had arrived just five years earlier, it would have sounded something like that.

From the 1950s to the early 2000s, sitcoms had laugh tracks, period.

And then, when laugh track-free shows like Arrested Development and the American version of The Office made it to network TV, they mostly disappeared.

Most sitcoms today don't have one, except for a few big hits like the Big Bang Theory and reboots like Roseanne.

When we talk about laugh tracks now it's mostly to make jokes about them but when paul was growing up and every show had a laugh track people didn't talk about them very much they were kind of a secret so few people knew about it or discussed it everybody hears it everybody is aware of it why won't anybody talk about it today we're gonna talk about it

Growing up, I never thought much about the laugh track one way or another.

They were just always there.

But as a TV critic, I've watched laugh tracks become contentious and deeply uncool.

It's always fascinated me that something we barely noticed for so long, something that we maybe even kind of liked, could become so annoying to so many people so quickly.

What changed?

Why did they exist in the first place?

Did we just realize they were really lame?

And if so, what took us so long?

From Slate magazine, this is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.

I'm Slate's TV critic Willa Paskin, and every month I'll take a cultural object, idea, or habit and try to figure out where it comes from, what it means, and why it matters.

Today, what happened to the laugh track?

Imagine it's the 1950s.

You've just gotten your very first television set.

It weighs a ton and it's a size of a bureau with wood paneling and a couple of dials on the side.

You set it up in the living room and you call in the whole family and you turn it on.

It's too late now.

But ladies and gentlemen, I must tell you.

It's the Jack Benny program.

Originally a hit radio show, the series starred Benny, a one-time vaudeville performer and comedian, as a version of himself, a radio star.

And now that show from the radio, it's on your television.

And even though you've heard it before, you've never seen anything like it.

Before, when you watched a performance, it was in public with an audience, and now it's happening in your house.

Think about how strange, how new that must have been.

And then listen.

You hear it?

Something recognizable, something reassuring, something that tells you what you're watching.

Laughter.

It was my sponsor who didn't have the nerve.

That's how most early TV comedies were recorded in front of a live audience, oftentimes in studios in New York.

By By the early 50s, as the TV industry moved away from New York and into Hollywood, executives wanted to move away from this traditional approach of broadcasting what amounted to live stage shows.

They wanted to shoot comedies on film, comedies that weren't live, but that still sounded live.

The solution to this problem?

The laugh track.

And the person who came up with the solution?

Charles Douglas, Charlie.

Douglas was a mechanical engineer who had worked on radar for the Navy in World War II, so he knew his way around audio and electronics.

In 1950, the Hank McCune Show, a mostly forgotten series from NBC, had used a rudimentary laugh track, but by 1953, Douglas had developed a better way to insert a laugh into a show.

If you've ever watched an old sitcom, you've almost certainly heard his work.

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I asked Ron Simon, curator of television and radio at the Paley Center, formerly the Museum of Television and Radio, what he knew.

Charlie Douglas took the concept of just adding laughter, probably from a transcription disc, to create a machine that could do it.

And he created this little box using laughter from Marcel Marceau and from Red Skelton, from the silent sequences, and created tape loops that could then be injected into film comedy to make it a live experience.

Douglas then poured over these laughs at his kitchen table night after night.

He spliced them into analog tape reels that could be played on a patented device Douglas had built himself out of household appliances, organ parts, and vacuum tubes.

The device was about three feet tall, the shape of a filing cabinet, very heavy, and had slots for 32 reels, which could hold 10 laughs each.

It was officially named the Audience Response Duplicator, but it became known as the Laugh Box, and that's laugh, spelled in the goofy 50 style, L-A-F-F.

The LAF Box is this weird machine that's closer to, we'll say, steampunk than it is to modern electronic technology.

Like an adding machine where you just press these dials and laughter would happen.

Eventually, it would evolve into more of a typewriter thing where you would punch keys.

The laugh box could chuckle.

It could laugh with sighed relief.

It even had a reel controlled by the foot pedal that was just hitters.

Tiny little one-person laughs.

At its most sophisticated, the box had 320 laughs.

It could play one laugh at a time by pressing one key, or by pressing multiple keys together.

It could play a bunch of laughs at once.

So if he thought something was remotely funny, he'd say, all right, let's have this guy laugh right here.

And he'd just have that going.

And maybe he'd come back and watch it and say, you know what, that wasn't quite as funny as the producer is going to want it.

So maybe he would add a second sound like this.

And then he would add it all together and mix it together so you hear the full product.

Three separate clips overlapped.

What would happen was the producer or the director would come back and see his work and say, you know what, that could use a much louder laugh.

Can you give it a louder guffaw?

And he'd say, all right, sure.

So he'd throw something in just like that.

Because laugh boxes were patented and handmade by Douglas, it wasn't like just anyone can make or use one.

There were only a handful of working models at a time, and he basically had a monopoly on the process.

By the 1960s, almost all sitcoms were single-camera shows filmed without an audience and tricked out with a raucous Charlie Douglas laugh track.

The boxes supplied laughter for tens of thousands of episodes of television.

Tens of thousands, maybe even more.

Everything from the Munsters Bewitched, the Beverly Hillbillies, Gilligan's Island, to Mary Tyler Moore, and Cheers.

For decades, their sound was was ubiquitous, but Douglas didn't want to talk about his device.

Douglas, whenever he went to a show, would cover it over and no one would actually see him at work.

There is something, you know, embarrassing.

It was certainly part of history, but,

you know, not many producers want to talk about and really actually talk about, you know, how the last sausage was actually made.

Douglas hardly ever gave interviews or spoke about his work.

A 1966 piece from TV Guide titled The Hollywood Sphinx and His Laugh Box, in which the Sphinx is Douglas, describes the mystery surrounding the man and his device.

The author wrote: 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 mention the name Charlie Douglas, and it's like Cosa Nostra.

Everybody starts whispering.

It's the most taboo topic in TV.

I want to say here that every knock on the laugh track that you've ever heard, that it's fake, that it's corny, that it's cheating, that it's not funny, that it thinks audiences are dumb, people have been saying since the beginning.

And that's part of the reason for Douglas's silence.

But listening to Douglas's laughs, hearing Paul try to recreate them, it changed how I thought about them.

I've always prided myself on being open-minded about the laugh track.

A funny show is a funny show, with or without one.

But even so, I always thought of them as automated, mechanical.

But they aren't really that at all.

They're a craft.

Charlie Douglas played his laugh box like it was an instrument, literally.

A lot of people think it was just a bunch of laughs thrown into a tape machine and someone's pushing the button.

It was an art.

I mean, he took it very seriously.

Here's one of Charlie's laughs.

It was used in the late 60s and 70s, including in the pilot for MASH.

You hear the laughter tailing off at the end?

I love that.

It tells a story in a single laugh.

There's a joke, but one guy in the audience, he doesn't get it right away.

He's a split second late, and then he laughs a little bit longer.

Here, listen to it again.

Charlie Douglas wasn't just a sound engineer.

He was a psychologist.

The rap on the laugh track is that it's fake laughter from a fake audience, but that's not quite right.

The laugh track doesn't just represent a bogus audience.

it represents an audience of one, of Charlie Douglas.

He definitely goose laughs at producers' instructions, but to a large extent, he and the people who worked for him followed their guts.

It's incredible that one man's taste and sense of humor were so important in pacing an entire type of television comedy, but it's true.

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So how did the laughter-driven era of TV come to an end?

How did the laugh track go from being a tittering companion to an annoyance?

To answer that, I think we need to think about the laugh track as not just a habit or an object, but an idea, an idea about why we laugh.

I'm going to get to another idea about laughter later on, but this first one, I think it makes the laugh track of the 50s and 60s make a lot more sense.

Here, I want you to listen to something, something that people once thought was really funny.

That menacing sequence is from the OK Laughing Record.

Okay, OKEH is the name of the record label that released it in 1922.

It was recorded a few years earlier in Germany and is the sound of a cornet being interrupted by a hysterically laughing woman who is joined by a hysterically laughing man.

That's it.

It goes on for two and a half minutes.

Two and a half creepy, creepy minutes.

But in 1922, people thought it was hilarious.

The OK Laughing Record was a huge novelty hit.

There's speculation it sold over a million copies.

It spawned an entire mini-genre of novelty laughing records.

The laugh track, it's a version of the OK Laughing Record.

It's trying to make you laugh just by listening to other people laugh.

What's funny must be the laughter because it's not the joke.

There is no joke.

But this particular approach to humor, it's not that popular right now.

To find someone to defend it, I had to talk to one of Paul's friends, Ben Glenn.

He's an art historian by training, but he's also a devoted laugh track enthusiast.

He and Paul are in the same Charlie Douglas Facebook group.

If you think about a show like that that relies heavily on the laugh track like Bewitched or The Munsters, if you didn't have it, it just wouldn't be funny.

Well, it might, but does that mean that shows just actually bad and it was using like this crutch?

Well,

yes, yes, partly, but but But somebody getting a pie in the face and then there's silence is not funny.

Right?

Somebody getting the pie in the face with a huge laugh, that's funny.

I found this, that does a tree falling in the forest make a sound, Zen Cohen of sitcom laughter, genuinely perplexing.

Is a pie in the face funny if no one laughs?

Is an episode of Friends funny if no one laughs?

That's what I wondered after coming across this video, posted on YouTube by the user SBOSS, a friends without a laugh track.

You can hear what the rhythm of the show is supposed to be, how the pacing depends upon there being laughter.

Without it, Friends sounds weird and unnatural.

If there's no audience laughter, it's suddenly stark how odd it is that the characters aren't trying to make each other laugh.

Friends need its laughs to be funny, even if some of them are fake.

Has anyone seen Rach?

She's upstairs not doing the dishes.

And I'll tell you something, you know, I'm not doing them this time.

I don't care if those dishes just sit in the sink until they're all covered with shit.

I'll do them when I get home.

The transition away from the laugh track started slowly.

In the 70s, with Norman Lear sitcoms like All in the Family, comedy started to be taped in front of a live studio audience again.

The audience's laughs would be smoothed out, edited, or boosted.

This is a process called sweetening, which Douglas had done a lot of, and it still happens all the time.

But the aim, already, was that the laughs should sound more realistic.

In the 80s and 90s, some shows, like The Wonder Years, The Larry Sanders Show, and The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, started to experiment with dropping the laugh track.

But TV's biggest hits, shows like Cheers, Seinfeld, and Friends, still had them.

By the late 90s, with the rise of cable and unlaughed tracks animated series like The Simpsons, even the network started contemplating making different kinds of comedies, setting up a collision between the old idea about comedy and the typical way of doing things and a new idea about comedy and a new way of shooting a TV show.

Caught in that collision?

Aaron Sorkin's Sports Night.

We're out two and a half minutes back.

In 1997, Sorkin sold Sports Night, his first TV show, to ABC.

It was a comedy set behind the scenes of an ESPN-style sports network.

Sorkin and the director, Tommy Schlamy, wanted to shoot it like a single camera show.

The set had four walls, the camera moved, and they wanted to shoot it without a laugh track.

ABC, not so much.

They wanted to do something different, but not that different.

Here's Schlami.

The economics of television, and certainly half-hour television, was so massive for shows that had had traditional laugh tracks that they were really very nervous about giving that up completely.

What did you feel like the laugh track meant about your show?

Here's what it is.

The sort of bass tone of a situational comedy is the laugh track.

I think we're familiar with it.

I think it sort of resonates in a certain way.

But I think it is kind of establishing a conceptual idea about a show that is saying, it's not real.

This is a theatrical presentation.

I'm there with this group of people.

We're all laughing.

It's fun.

That was not the idea of the way I think Aaron wrote or what I think Sports Night was about.

Here's a clip of the laugh track from the Sports Night Pilot.

Yeah, but the point I'm making is that I can't.

I'm Jeremy Goodwin.

Oh, you're here for the associate producer job.

Yes, and let me just say that.

Sports Night was one of the first shows where, as a viewer, I could really feel that the laugh track was holding the show back.

Sports Night is fast.

It doesn't want to pause to wait for the audience's laughter.

So the laughs have to be shoehorned into the rare breaks in Sorkin's dense dialogue, where they sound even faker than usual.

Dispatches from a whole other sensibility.

What you can hear starting to happen with Sports Night is a laugh track changing from background noise into an impediment.

It's actively keeping Sports Night from being as funny and fast, from being as good as it could be.

After its first few episodes, Sports Night stopped being taped in front of an audience at all, and the laughter got even fainter.

Here's a clip from an episode at the end of season one.

Yes.

Yes, you're breaking up now.

Hello, you're breaking up.

Now you're not there at all.

There's nobody there at all.

Yet I'm still talking.

All right.

For its second season, ABC let the show drop the laugh track entirely, but it was canceled at the end of that season anyway, in 2000, just ever so slightly ahead of its time.

The laugh track-free British version of The Office premiered in 2001.

In 2003, Arrested Development started airing on Fox.

In 2005, the American adaptation of The Office started airing on NBC, the first huge hit without a laugh track.

That same year, Everybody Loves Raymond won the Emmy for Best Comedy.

That's the last time a sitcom with a laugh track has done so, the end of the laugh track era.

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So what changed?

I want to talk about another theory about laughter that's different from the pie-in-the-face theory I mentioned earlier.

In this theory, laughter isn't a fundamentally social activity, something that we do just because everyone else is doing it.

It's something deeply, wonderfully individual, and idiosyncratic, a reaction to the quality of the joke itself.

Representing this point of view is the TV writer Andy Secunda.

Andy's now a writer on the current ABC sitcom The Goldbergs, which doesn't have a laugh track, but his first show, the 2004 UPN sitcom Love Incorporated, about modern-day matchmakers, did.

But that's not fair.

I have a dream too.

What's your dream?

To have $10,000 more dollars.

I'm talking about $10,000 to help improve the human condition.

Well, $10,000 will help improve this human's condition very much.

Before working on Love Incorporated, Andy had been a writer for Conan and a teacher and performer at the improv comedy powerhouse, Upright Citizens Brigade.

I was an alternative comedy snob and coming out of the New York scene already was like every show with a laugh track other than Seinfeld is, you know, passe,

a dinosaur.

But Andy didn't have the clout to keep Love Incorporated from having a laugh track.

The show was performed in front of a studio audience, and they had some real laughs, but then a sound editor came in to sweeten it, boosting and manipulating all of them.

So the real laughs were replaced by a laugh track.

But Andy didn't want to use that laugh track in the typical way.

So I guess my take was, well, since we're doing this anyway, why don't we just decide what's funny?

To me, I was like, if, well, it's going to be this creation,

this false thing, why go halfway?

Just make the whole thing a fiction.

I want to train the audience that's watching at home who's not really paying that much attention anyway, in my head.

In other words, Andy wanted to rig the laugh track to reflect what was really funny.

He understood how the laugh track is supposed to work, that it's supposed to make people laugh at what other people are laughing at.

But he wanted to retrofit it to account for this second theory of laughter, to tell audiences, hey, some jokes are just funnier than others, and you should laugh at those.

Andy didn't succeed.

His boss wouldn't have it.

But even so, you can see, he may be skeptical of the laughter of the crowd, but he believes in the objective quality of the joke.

You may be able to get a big laugh out of an audience and be not that great a comic.

I mean, a lot of comics would argue, well, if you get the laugh, then you are a great comic.

I disagree because I'm a snob.

Andy may be a snob, but his perspective has become widespread.

This is how lots of people think about comedy now.

Me included.

Some jokes just are better than others, and you can't tell simply based on what got the biggest laugh, especially when that laugh comes from a laugh track.

For decades, TV was ruled by this idea that laughter is socially contingent.

And then that idea was surpassed by this other idea, that laughter is idiosyncratic and individual.

But this was a big transition.

For some viewers, the laugh track didn't just stop encouraging laughter.

It started inhibiting it.

The laugh track broke.

Today, shows with laugh tracks have been almost entirely cut out of the critical conversation, but they still have their modern-day defenders and uses, especially in the revivals of beloved shows that had laugh tracks, like Will and Grace.

Netflix's 2017 reboot of Norman Lear's One Day at a Time, a show about a divorced Cuban-American veteran with PTSD, raising her son and teenage daughter while living with her mother, is great.

It's smart, it's charming, it's queer, and it has a laugh track too.

She has to have a kinsis.

How else will we know the day that our little girl becomes a woman?

You missed it.

I was 12, I was in gym, and ironically, it happened in first period.

So, just so you know, so this is a podcast we're we're doing about the laugh track.

I'm wanting to talk to you guys because you do a great show that has a laugh track.

It doesn't have a laugh track, it's actually a live audience.

I knew you were going to say that, but we're going to talk about all that in detail.

That's Gloria Calderon-Kellett and Mike Royce, the showrunners of One Day at a Time.

They're right.

Their show is filmed in front of a live audience, as was the original.

Mike and Gloria say their sound editor cuts down on the awes and the more excessive whoops for Rita Moreno, and even trims down some laughs.

But they say there's no sweetening in their show.

When I said it was a laugh track, like, why does that bother you so much?

Some people just don't like to hear other people laughing because it feels like they're being told what to do.

But part of that comes from, I think, feeling like the laughter is somehow fakely added on.

Mike is right.

That is how some people feel about the laugh track, that it's a false advertisement trying to sell you a bad joke as though it's a good one.

And sometimes that is what the laugh track is.

So I asked why it was worth risking that kind of reaction.

For me, it's about a shared experience.

So I feel like it's an opportunity to experience a play in the comfort of your home, but you're experiencing it as though you are a part of a community.

We want them to experience the emotions audibly, you know, like it's there's there is something about that.

Crying too, by the way.

For Gloria and Mike, the laugh track is a reminder that other people are there, watching with you, even when you're all alone, just like it has been from the very beginning.

I want to go back to that scene from earlier when you turned on the TV for the first time and saw the Jack Benny program and it was so new and strange.

When you heard the audience laughing, it was a cue that you should laugh too.

Yes, but also it was a sign, a sign that you weren't watching alone.

The laugh track was trying to bridge the bizarre new distance between the audience and the performers, between the audience and other members of the audience.

The thing you have to remember, and this is so different than now, is that the laugh track was trying to overcome a defect of television, which is that unlike vaudeville and the movies, you watched it all by yourself.

Now that defect that you don't have to go anywhere or interact with anyone while you watch it, that's one of TV's biggest selling points.

And the laugh track, it helped us to get to that point.

For a long time, the laugh track seemed permanent, but it was really more like training wheels, something that taught us this new skill of watching and laughing in solitude.

It might have stuck around way too long, but it did his job really well.

By the late 90s and early aughts, when the numbers of shows on cable started to skyrocket and the TV audience began to fragment, we were totally ready to move from one theory of laughter to another, to embrace the idea of ourselves as individuals with idiosyncratic comedic taste who did not need or even want the laughter's lame chortle of approval to know what was funny.

These days, it's the laugh track that seems weird and vestigial, a sound from another time, unless we're specifically after the theatrical communal throwback experience of a show like One Day at a Time.

The laugh track has always been a tool, and nearly 70 years after it was invented, there's nothing to fix.

Watching TV alone isn't the weird activity, watching together is.

As multi-camera comedies with laugh tracks have faded out, single-camera comedies without laughs have only gotten more and more adventurous, leading to a whole upheaval in what constitutes a comedy, full stop.

Many of the buzziest, buzziest, most well-regarded comedies, like Atlanta and Girls and Transparent, are more funny-adjacent than Laugh Out Loud funny.

They aren't after that big, big laugh.

Making people laugh is really, really hard.

One shortcut from decades ago was to fake that laughter.

A more modern fix is not to worry about whether audiences are laughing at all.

My littlest baggage would probably be my IBS.

And

my medium baggage would be that I truly don't love my grandmother.

Like, you don't love her at all?

So then, what would your biggest baggage be?

I'm a virgin.

Obviously.

Even if they're not laughing, audiences are finding makeshift ways to watch communally.

If you're looking for the present-day technological equivalent of the laugh track, look at social media.

Sitting on your couch, reading Twitter while you watch Atlanta or a football game or The Bachelor, those tweets are a signal about what's good and what's interesting.

Sometimes they're just the show's best jokes, tweeted verbatim.

Often, those tweets will make you laugh.

They'll definitely keep you from feeling like you're watching all alone.

Learning the history of the laugh track, thinking about it as a way to foster a feeling of togetherness, it really made me wonder, is solo binging with headphones on while the person in the very same room as you watches something else really better than gathering around one of three channels, politely putting up with canned laughter?

In one of these experiences, you definitely get to decide what's funny for yourself, but you really are doing it all alone.

I think this is part of what drives laugh track aficionados like Paul Iverson.

When he tinkers with laugh tracks and adds them back into old episodes of The Pink Panther or the Monkeys, he's recapturing the spirit of a different time, a different way of watching television, when laughter wasn't a judgment, but a companion.

When I asked Paul what his favorite Charlie Douglas laugh was, he had one, of course.

He got right to the heart of it.

It was basically a deep man's laugh.

that was used sparingly and then it started to get used more regularly and it sounds like this

When we heard that one, my sister would say, There's your friend.

I'm Willipaskin.

This is Decodering.

Thanks for listening.

If you liked the show, please go rate it and subscribe on our own feed on Apple Podcasts so you don't miss an episode.

And even better, go tell your friends.

If you have any cultural mysteries you'd love us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

You can find out more about the show show at slate.com slash decodering.

You can follow me on Twitter at Willipaskin.

We have a ton of people we want to thank for this episode.

A very special thanks to Slate's editor Julia Turner and Slate podcast executive producer Steve Lichtai, without whom the show would not exist.

Also, thank you, Annie Chelsea, Derek Thompson, Jacob Smith, Peter Zontig, Joe Adallion, June Thomas, Dan Coys, Laura Bennett, Ava LaBelle, Flores Wickman, TJ Raphael, Chris Barubay, Jacob Rogan, Andrew Parsons, Caitlin Roper, Leon Napak, Katie Mingle, the New York City Radio Club, and everyone else who gave us feedback and help along the way.

This podcast is produced and edited by Benjamin Frisch.

We'll see you next month.

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