Everyone has watched a comedy series on television that has those recorded laughs inserted between one joke and another, right? “Chaves”, “Friends”, “How I Met Your Mother”, among many others that we know, use this resource, known as claque.
Although we are already quite accustomed to “canned laughter”, there is no denying that it is somewhat strange nowadays, since everyone knows that it is not spontaneous and natural laughter. There are professionals in the field who criticize its use because they consider it an insult to the public’s intelligence.
However, we have to think about how television was made at the time these laughs were created and what television meant at that time.
Think about it: in the 1950s, if you wanted to see a comedy show, you had to go to a theater, surrounded by other people and with the right to applause and laughter, which were “part of the package”. Suddenly, with the advent of television, a huge, heavy screen in the middle of the living room brought the show into your home. How incredible, right?
In the 1950s, TV comedies were filmed with just one camera and a live audience. This meant that the same scene had to be shot several times so that the camera could record from different angles. In other words, the audience’s reactions ended up being different with each take: either the laughter was at the wrong moment, or no one laughed at the right time, or the laughs were too long or too short, or too shrill or quiet. The end result ended up not being very good, and laughter was an important tool in giving the audience the feeling that they were watching the show “live”.
Since spontaneous laughter was unavoidable, Charley Douglass, a sound engineer who worked at CBS in the early days of television, decided to create his own laugh machine.
The invention of laughter: Charley Douglass and the laff box - The Verge
The Laff Box, by Charley Douglass. Image: www.theverge.com/
As a mechanical engineer who had worked on Navy radar during World War II, Douglass was familiar with electronics and sound. He worked with the idea of simply adding l bolivia phone number data aughter, probably from a transcription disc, and created a machine that could do it. Ron Simon, curator of television and radio at the Paley Center for Media, formerly the Museum of Television and Radio, explained that Douglass “created this little box using Marcel Marceau and Red Skelton laughs from the silent sequences and created tape loops that could be injected into a film comedy to make it a live experience.”
Night after night, the engineer pored over these laughs at the kitchen table, splicing them into reels of analog tape that could be played back on a patented device Douglass built himself from household appliances, organ parts, and vacuum tubes. It was truly manual labor, and the result was a large, crude, and cumbersome device—but it served its purpose. Initially called the Audience Response Duplicator, it eventually became known as the Laff Box, and it contained 320 types of laughs.
Throughout the 1950s, the way TV comedies were recorded changed: instead of being made live in front of an audience in New York, they were recorded in a studio in Hollywood. However, the idea was that they would still look like they were being made live.
Even with the advancement of technology and modern productions that we have today, cheerleaders are still used in several productions. “The Big Bang Theory”, a hugely successful sitcom, ended in 2019 and still used the so-called “canned laughter”.
A study conducted by University College London in England, which included some participants with autism, indicated that the laugh track actually makes the joke funnier. It's as if the artificial laughter creates a herd effect, and everyone has the same reaction. It also works as a kind of endorsement, like when we wait for someone to laugh first so that we know we can laugh too. Despite being old, the use of the laugh track is a successful formula.
However, as everything has its drawbacks, it is no different with “canned laughter”. This resource only works when the sitcom follows a certain script structure, with dialogues and catchphrases that are the right “cue” for laughter. This ends up hindering the production a bit.
Series made in this format require the use of a cheerleader, or the scene will end up looking really weird. See this example in “The Big Bang Theory”, where the artificial laughter was purposely removed from the scene:
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