Navigation
Contribute
Sister projects
From WinkyPedia, the free encyclopedia that tells you what you already knew
A laugh track, or canned laughter, is recorded laughter added to a television programme to sound like a live audience. Its best-known early form was the “laff box”, built in the early 1950s by the American sound engineer Charles Douglass: a keyboard-operated machine holding tape loops of many different laughs, from chuckles to roars, which he could play and mix by hand.[1] Douglass kept the machine padlocked and wheeled it from studio to studio himself. For years, much of the laughter on American television came out of one locked box, operated by one man, who was the only person who knew what was inside it.
The laughs on the tape loops are thought to have come largely from recordings of real audiences reacting to silent moments in live shows, such as mime routines, so that no talking would spoil them. Douglass could choose the size, length and type of each laugh, and add titters, groans or applause.[2] Producers hired him to “sweeten” their shows, which is the only known use of the word for adding laughter to something that may not have been funny.
The same laughs were reused for decades. Some viewers became able to recognise individual laughs from one programme to the next, which means certain people who laughed at a show in the 1950s have now laughed at thousands of jokes they never heard.
Studies have found that people tend to laugh more, and for longer, at jokes that are accompanied by laughter, even when they know it is recorded. Laughter is contagious, and it turns out to be contagious from a tape loop as well. The laugh track is therefore the only form of entertainment that works partly by telling the audience what it thinks.