Towards the mid-1950s, in the comedy series broadcast on US broadcasters, a technique began to be used which would have particular success in the following decades, to the point of becoming one of the distinctive elements of programs of this type: recorded laughter.
Despite having always received contrary opinions and caused great annoyance in those who have never gotten used to them, for more than seventy years they have been a recurring element of American sitcoms and beyond. And even if they stopped being used a few years ago because they were considered anachronistic and outdated, they are an integral part of some much loved and recently rediscovered series, such as Friends, and other successful ones that aired until a few years ago such as The Big Bang Theory.
They were invented in 1953 by sound engineer Charles Rolland Douglass. Observing the programs broadcast in those years, which in almost all cases took place in the presence of an audience, he realized how difficult it was to make the people inside the studio laugh at the right time. To overcome this problem he thought of inventing a mechanism that on some occasions would amplify the audience’s laughter, and on others – those in which the audience did not laugh at the jokes planned by the authors – replace them completely.
The solution was the so-called laff box, i.e. a button panel that contained dozens of recorded human sounds to be used just in case, including applause and laughter. Initially the idea was a success and helped program hosts in particular, who by using the laff box at the right time were able to prevent some unpleasant situations, such as unsuccessful jokes that could have been followed by embarrassing seconds of silence.
There are those who maintain that in reality Douglass did not invent anything, given that between 1949 and 1953, before he began designing the laff box, recorded laughter had already been used on the CBS radio program Bing Crosby – Chesterfield Show, hosted by singer and presenter Bing Crosby: Douglass would therefore have limited himself to applying the idea also to television broadcasts of the time, which in effect were similar to some sort of radio programs recorded in front of an audience.
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As Jacob Stern wrote aboutAtlanticin the 1960s laff boxes were played «as if they were magical instruments, eliciting applause or squeals of joy with the simple press of a button».
Even though they would become an enormous innovation in the field of entertainment, some professionals despised recorded laughter right from the start, considering it an invitation to laugh on command and, therefore, an insult to the spectator’s intelligence.
They were not used for example in Lucy and mea popular sitcom produced by CBS and broadcast between 1951 and 1957. The two protagonists, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, chose to use a normal microphone to capture the natural and real-time laughter of the audience (which, as in all productions of the period, was present in studio during filming). The producers advised them against using this method to avoid the audience laughing at the wrong times, but Arnaz and Ball argued that without recorded laughter the series would have been less artificial.
Comedian and screenwriter Larry David is also notoriously against recorded laughter: he didn’t even want to use it in Seinfeldhis most famous sitcom, because he believed that the audience should have fun spontaneously, in an informal way “driven”. At the However, in the end he had to adapt to the requests of Castle Rock Entertainment, his production company. Today Seinfeld is considered one of the most important and influential sitcoms of all time, and the recorded laughter is considered one of its stylistic peculiarities. However, to appreciate the comedy of the series in its purity, some fans have published some of the most famous scenes in version on YouTube “No laugh track”, that is, without recorded laughter.
Interviewed by Stern, television producer Ron Simon explained that, in addition to facilitating the work of writers and hosts, the purpose of the recorded laughter was to recreate in viewers the “community experience” that they would have lived as part of the studio audience. The intention, according to Stern, was therefore not to underestimate the intelligence of the viewers, but to involve them and make them feel part of the audience that attended those programs live.
Between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, recorded laughter was also used in programs that did not involve the presence of a studio audience, such as cartoons. From this point of view the most famous example is that of Flintstonesa cult animated series created by the production company Hanna-Barbera.
According to Tim Brooks, author of the essay The Complete Directory to Prime-Time Network and Cable TV Showsin those two decades recorded laughter was exploited extensively by producers, who hoped that viewers at home would find the programs funnier even when they weren’t at all.
Things began to change in the 1980s, when some comedy programs, such as Hooperman and the Larry David Show, they began to do without recorded laughter in order to accustom the audience to laughing spontaneously. Antipathy towards recorded laughter grew even more between the 1990s and the early 2000s, when some critics began to describe them as outdated and in bad taste narrative devices.
In 2003 for example the New York Times he wrote that recorded laughter “practically no one likes it, perhaps because it is such an obvious fig leaf for the embarrassment of weak jokes, perhaps because it makes us feel commanded and condescending, perhaps because it dehumanizes one of the most human actions that exist.” However, as Stern recalled, around the same time Friendsthe most popular sitcom of those years, made extensive use of recorded laughter, without the audience or critics complaining too much about it.
Although Friends it was a huge success, the recorded laughter began to decline right around the time it was broadcast. Journalist Abbey White wrote about Loopers that one of the reasons was the attitude of foreign productions, particularly Latin American and Canadian ones, which refused to use fake laughter in the original recordings and only included them when the series were sold to US broadcasters.
Again according to White, another of the reasons that led to the overcoming of recorded laughter was the emergence of a new genre of sitcoms, that of the so-called cringe comedy, as The Office And Malcomwhich achieved enormous success with audiences and critics without using them, encouraging a whole new generation of TV shows to put aside the laff boxes and focus on more spontaneous comedy.
Even though they are now widely considered outdated and twentieth-century, some series from the early 2000s continued to use them until a few years ago: the most famous cases are those of How I Met Your Mother And The Big Bang Theoryand its spin-off Young Sheldon. According to several critics, in the case of The Big Bang Theory this choice would be in line with the writing of the series, which is characterized by obsolete narrative mechanisms and an intense use of clichés typical of the Eighties.
Recorded laughter is also present in recent series released on streaming platforms, such as That ’90s Show of Netflix, where however their use is designed to meet its target audience which is mostly made up of nostalgic That ’70s Showwhich was released at the end of the nineties, and is itself set in those years, with frequent references to the pop culture typical of that decade.
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As Stern wrote, older audiences, those who grew up watching television and with sitcoms as their primary form of entertainment, “watch more TV than any other age group,” and recorded laughter is likely to continue to be used as long as this type of viewer is important for the television market.
The practice of using recorded laughter has become very common even in non-American productions: over the years they have also been used in several Italian sitcoms, such as Vianello House, Love Bugs And Beautiful inside.
Luca Barra, coordinator of the master’s degree course in Information, culture and media organization at the University of Bologna and director of the newspaper Link – ideas for television, said in an interview with journalist Maria Grazia Falà that, when the first US sitcoms arrived in Italy, the public struggled to understand the meaning of the recorded laughter. Barra also explained that the recorded laughter is not made to make us feel stupid, but «so as not to make us laugh alone in front of the television screen, because when one laughs alone one feels a little embarrassed. We know that many other people, seeing the same series, just when we are watching it, have the same reaction, the same laughter.”
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