Laughter

Alvy: You add fake laughter with a machine? Do you have any idea how immoral that is?
Max: We tape in front of a studio audience.
Alvy: But nobody laughs because the jokes aren't funny.
Max: Yes, that's why this machine is dynamite.

Alvy watches the editor add laughter, chuckles and applause to awful jokes under Max’s direction

Alvy: (to Editor) Do you have booing on that?

Alvy and Max, scene from Annie Hall

That was Woody Allen as Alvy and Tony Roberts as Max from the film Annie Hall and sums up the split between the studios and actors such as David Niven who said in a 1955 interview, “The laugh track is the single greatest affront to public intelligence I know of, and it will never be foisted on any audience of a show I have some say about”.

There were some radio shows in the 30s and 40s that used canned laughter but not many, for instance, when Bing Crosby began pre-recording his show – which allowed his engineers to add or subtract the laughs in post-production.

And then came Charley Douglass who didn’t like the laughter he was hearing. The sound engineer, who was working at CBS in the early days of television, hated that the studio audiences on the US TV channel’s shows laughed at the wrong moments, didn’t laugh at the right moments, or laughed too loudly or for too long and began amping up or tamping down laughter recordings according to the effect he wanted, rather than relying on audiences’ natural reactions. 

Charley Douglass

He soon made a machine full of taped laugh tracks (according to historians, recorded mainly during dialogue-free sequences in a programme, The Red Skelton Show) that would evolve to become the industry standard after Douglass’s laugh-track debut in 1950 on The Hank McCune Show.

Douglas’s machine, known in the industry as the ‘laff box’ – was tightly secured with padlocks, stood more than two feet tall, and operated like an organ. Douglass used a keyboard similar to that of a typewriter to select the corresponding style, gender and age of the laugh as well as a pedal to time the length of the reaction. Inside the machine was a wide array of recorded chuckles, general laughs and belly laughs.

the Laff Box

Rather than being simple recordings of a laughing audience, Douglass's laughs were carefully generated and mixed, giving some laughs detailed identities such as "the guy who gets the joke early" and "housewife giggles" and "the one who didn't get the joke but is laughing anyway" all blended and layered to create the illusion of a real audience responding to the show in question. A man's deep laugh would be switched for a new woman's laugh, or a high-pitched woman's giggle would be replaced with a man's snicker.

In the UK all of the BBC’s comedies, such as Are You Being Served? had laugh tracks. But in the 1980s, the laugh track’s hold on UK comedies began to falter, following The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s abandonment of the device. The political satire show Spitting Image filmed its first episode with a studio audience at the insistence of broadcaster ITV, then ditched it too.

Spitting Image

So canned laughter is pretty well defunct now and thank heavens for that.

As for laughter in terms of poetry there are many poets that can make me smile but very few who can make me laugh, and especially, make me laugh every time I read the poem. Off the top of my head I’d say Dorothy Parker and Billy Collins as examples.

This is one I wrote years ago but given that it hopes to raise a laugh and relates to the current season so I can only use it once a year here it is:

Allergy (Written in a Country Churchyard)

The pollen tells the tale of parting day
The flowing nose winds slowly to a sneeze
The tissue upward prods its weary way
And leaves are worlds of darkness in a wheeze.

First published in Purple Patch 2004ish

Terry Q.