Note: this episode makes more sense to hear than to read. It’s our version of The Twilight Zone’s “Cavender Is Coming.”
Today in 1910, the birthday of Charlie Douglass, who popularized the use of prerecorded laughter to help TV comedies seem more funny.
He’s a laugh track pioneer.
The laugh track actually became a tool for showrunners in the 1940s, during the golden age of radio.
Lots of shows had studio audiences that would (hopefully) react to the performances, clapping and laughing.
But sometimes the reaction wasn’t quite what the producers wanted: the laughs weren’t loud enough or long enough, or maybe they were too long.
Producers of pre-recorded shows could add in taped sounds of laughter wherever they wanted.
When the age of television got underway, producers there also used the process, known as sweetening.
Charlie Douglass was a broadcast engineer who took sweetening to a new level with an invention called the “laff box.”
His machine had a whole bank of laughs that an engineer could call up using keys and foot pedals; it was sort of like playing a piano that was very ticklish.
Soon, all kinds of comedies were using laugh tracks to punch up the reactions to their jokes.
That included shows that didn’t have an audience in the studio when they were filmed, as well as cartoon shows with laugh tracks (where exactly is the laughter coming from on “The Jetsons” or “Scooby-Doo”?)
But the funny thing is, no matter how artificial or illogical some laugh tracks were, once they were on shows, the audience came to expect them, and if they weren’t there, viewers felt like something was missing.
And that’s why the laugh track is still around today: it’s hard for shows to take away something you expect to hear.
And, in their way, they work: comedies are trying to make us laugh, and we’ve all heard that laughter is contagious, so canned laughter is a wordless way to say to the audience “this is funny, time to start laughing.”
If a laugh track doesn’t get people cracking up, the plan B is to say just a single word: Urkel.
In 2024, mathematicians in Europe had theorized the existence of something called a soft cell, essentially a shape with no sharp corners.
Last year, an astronaut aboard the International Space Station was able to use the microgravity of Earth orbit to make a soft cell, something that can’t be done on Earth.
Charles Rolland ‘Charlie’ Douglass (Variety via Archive.org)
The Art of Science: Soft Cell in Space (University of Oxford)
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Thanks to our studio audience here and here and here
Photo by Plastered T-shirts via Wikicommons/Creative Commons
