RIP canned laughter, the most evil innovation in TV history

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to mark the passing of one of the most frequent visitors to our homes. We speak of the creature with a hundred voices and no face. The creature that, studies suggest, effectively manipulated our emotions more than anything on TV over the years. Yep, we’re calling it: The sitcom laugh track, more recently known in the trade as “sweetened” audience laughter, canned laughter to its enemies, is finally stone-cold dead in its eighth decade.

Many, it is fair to say, will not mourn.

But if we can stand a moment at the graveside, we will find there are lessons to be drawn from the life of this strange 1950s innovation, one that stitched its mark on almost every minute of every American comedy for decades. In an era when emotions are manipulated on social media, it’s important that we remember how our entertainment networks made us laugh even when the jokes weren’t funny — and how that tyranny of manipulation ended.

To begin at the end…

Last of the laughs: ‘The Big Bang Theory’ cast go out on a sweetened note.
Credit: CBS

Historians will dispute the exact moment of death. Was it when The Big Bang Theory, the last major sweetened sitcom, went off the air in 2019? Was it early in the COVID pandemic, when even the most unfiltered studio audience started to sound weird and quite possibly illegal? Was it only proven brain dead in late 2021, when no sweetened TV sitcoms debuted on U.S. networks during the all-important fall season?

Regardless, we knew the deceased was on life support for years. Its disease began when laugh-trackless comedies of the 1990s and early 2000s trusted the audience to know what’s funny: The Simpsons, The Larry Sanders Show, Malcolm in the Middle, Arrested Development. When the UK and U.S. versions of The Office became the most popular comedies on both sides of the Atlantic, a tipping point was reached. Decline came on fast: After The Office won its first comedy Emmy in 2006, no show with added laughter ever won the category again.

By the mid 2010s, no longer protected by nervous executives, laugh-track comedies were in full retreat. They were losing in the marketplace of jokes. Freed from laughter pauses, fast-paced shows like 30 Rock could really cram in the funny. (Check out this YouTuber’s experiment, which clocks the number of jokes in each kind of sitcom.)

With the rise of the internet, audiences had grown savvy and skeptical. Many saw viral YouTube videos that removed laugh tracks from top-notch sitcoms, turning shows like Friends into sad tales of automatons who stare at each other during multiple creepy silences. Even one of the finest moment of Seinfeld was revealed as profoundly unfunny without the laugh track.

And then there was the science. While a 2002 comparison of Seinfeld and the Simpsons showed that the former’s laugh track didn’t light up any extra comedy centers in the brain, a 2019 study concluded that laugh tracks make us chuckle when we wouldn’t otherwise consider the jokes funny. Laughter predates language — other primates also use laughter as a social bonding tool — so it makes sense that are hardwired to laugh at the same thing as a group, even if we can’t see the group.

This raises a question that scholarship has barely begun to answer: What have we been manipulated into laughing along with all these years? The 2021 AMC comedy Kevin Can F**k Himself offers one disturbing answer. The protagonist’s manchild husband has his sad, destructive antics approved by a haunting fake studio audience — one that disappears when he’s out of the room, suggesting canned laughter has covered up casual misogyny in sitcoms for years.

Reports of its return to primetime life have been greatly exaggerated. “The laugh track is back in fashion,” The Wall Street Journal opined in August — but its only examples turned out to be Kevin Can F**k Himself and WandaVision, two shows where canned laughter is used in limited doses to enhance creepiness. They were exceptions that helped to destroy the rule.

It’s like we’ve all been living in Wanda Maximoff’s fake-perfect Westview. Only now the spell is definitively broken are we able to wipe decades’ worth of horrific fake smiles off our faces. But who was so expertly pulling the strings in the first place?

It was Laff Box guy all along

Canned laughter was born in the days of radio, helped along in no small part when Bing Crosby discovered that sound engineering meant he could pre-record shows and still sound like he was entertaining a playhouse. (We modern work-from-homers salute you, Bing.) Still, radio comedies were generally recorded live in front of an unsweetened audience, because why wouldn’t you? It’s radio.

Only when TV required multiple takes from different camera angles, and each take was accompanied by an audience laughing in a different way, that a new problem emerged — and was quickly solved by an enterprising engineer. Charley Douglass was the inventor of the Laff Box, a mysterious typewriter-like instrument. Each key was connected to a different kind of taped laugh, for a total of 320 laughs. Many were taped from The Red Skelton Show, because that early 1950s comedy often had dialogue-free mime sketches.

Laughs from those 1950s audiences would be heard across America for decades, because Douglass had a monopoly. Almost all sitcoms of the 1960s bear his stamp; executives couldn’t get enough Laff Box, and began to reason that more of it would make more shows seem more funny. Douglass and his family became virtuosos of the audience laughter organ. To protect it from prying eyes they shrouded the machine in secrecy, to the point of taking it to the bathroom when it needed fixing.

Douglass’ monopoly broke down in the 1970s, when other engineers figured out how to play the audience too. The laughter became more subtle than the shrieking of the Douglass era, and more shows started to be filmed before a live studio audience — which, as the announcer would never say, would still be manipulated by an accomplished organ player. By the 1980s, as you can see in this video, the same basic formula remained in place: One wizened white male was deciding the places in a show that America was going to laugh at.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world was a more laugh-track free utopia. British comedy had little need of sweetening; if someone in the Monty Python audience coughed, or got the joke too late, you heard about it. The BBC even got export versions of some U.S. sitcoms, mercifully stripped of the laugh track. Growing up in the UK is why I’ve never been able to watch M*A*S*H* in America; the canned laughter seems sacrilegious, like crayon marks on the Sistine Chapel.

(M*A*S*H* producers fought CBS for years to remove it and lost; even now, the version streaming on Hulu is the laugh-track one.)

The more sweetening became software, the more it softened. By the Big Bang Theory era it had become a matter of mere gardening: trimming a too-long audience laugh here, pruning the wild cheers at an actor’s entrance there. The form had been perfected — just in time for its final rejection by society.