How did the sitcom laugh track come about?

The laugh track grew out of radio production practices of the 1940s and was adapted for television by CBS sound engineer Charley Douglass. The first American TV show to use one was The Hank McCune Show in 1950. Douglass then built machines of recorded laughter that dominated American comedy for years. [1] [2]

Before television, radio producers tried to recreate the feel of a live audience with recorded crowd reactions. Wikipedia credits Jack Dadswell, a Florida station owner, with the first laughing record. Pre-recording became practical after Jack Mullin brought German Magnetophon tape recorders back from Germany in 1946, and Bing Crosby adopted the technology for his weekly radio show. Because sound could now be edited after the fact, engineers could add or remove laughs. [1] [2]

Mullin's account, as quoted on Wikipedia, is that the first laugh track came when comic Bob Burns told racy stories on Crosby's show. The jokes were too off-color to broadcast, but the big laughs were saved, and scriptwriter Bill Morrow later insisted they be inserted into a weaker show. This is one person's recollection rather than a documented record. [1]

Douglass disliked how live audiences behaved. They laughed at the wrong moments, too loudly, or for too long. He began adjusting audience reactions in post-production, a process called sweetening: adding laughter to jokes that fell flat and gradually muting laughter that ran on. His first prototype used tape of mild laughs glued to a 28-inch wooden wheel, and it fell apart within months. He later extracted laughter and applause from recordings of The Red Skelton Show and other sources and loaded them into a large tape machine, nicknamed the Laff Box. [1] [3] [2]

Professor Jeremy Butler of the University of Alabama says Douglass was not the first to try a laugh track but was the one who dominated the late 1950s and 1960s, and that he guarded his creation jealously. Butler says Douglass supplied essentially all the laughs heard on American TV in the 1960s and early 1970s. The ABC piece describes the machine as roughly the size of a small refrigerator. [4]

I Love Lucy used several cameras and a real studio audience, so its laughter was genuine. Many other shows of the 1950s and 1960s used the single-camera technique and added a laugh track to simulate the missing audience. Producers saw live audiences as tense and unreliable, and filming without one was simpler and cheaper. Writers began leaving gaps in scripts for laughs. Author Jennifer Keishin Armstrong says studios valued the efficiency and uniformity, calling it a security blanket. [1] [4] [2]

In 1965 CBS tested two versions of the Hogan's Heroes pilot. The one without laughter performed poorly and the one with it was received more favorably, and CBS then put laugh tracks into all its comedy programming. The BBC article adds that the early aim was to help viewers feel comfortable with a new medium. [1] [2]