A laugh track is used in a TV show for the first time - September 9th, 1950

On this day in 1950, the laugh track made its TV debut on “The Hank McCune Show.”

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio, Hello,
and Welcome to This Day in History Class, a show
that believes there's no time like the present to learn
about the past. I'm Gay, Blues Yay, and today we're
looking at the rise and fall of the infamous laugh track,

(00:21):
a bizarre innovation that cued people on when to laugh
while watching television. The day was September ninth, nineteen fifty.
The laugh track made its TV debut on The Hank
McCune Show. Variety magazine reviewed the show's premiere episode and

(00:45):
made sure to note the new feature, explaining that quote,
although the show is lensed on film without a studio audience,
there are chuckles and yucks dubbed in. Whether this induces
a jovial mood in home viewers is to be determined,
but the practice may have unlimited possibilities if it spread
to include canned peals of hilarity, thunderous ovations, and gasps

(01:10):
of sympathy. Although it's most commonly associated with TV sitcoms,
especially the older ones, canned laughter was first introduced for
radio shows. Bing Crosby was one of the technique's earliest
proponents in the nineteen forties, as it allowed him to
pre record his shows and still make it sound like
he was performing for a packed house. The laugh track

(01:33):
made its way to television in the nineteen fifties thanks
to the efforts of CBS sound engineer Charlie Douglas. At
the time, most TV shows were filmed in front of
a studio audience, and the crowd's organic reactions were baked
into the soundtrack. This annoyed Douglas to no end, as
people would often laugh too long, too loudly, or at

(01:55):
the wrong moments. In response, the engineer took a page
from the rat playbook and began adjusting the audio levels
of laughs in post production. He then went a step
further by building a bespoke machine that could playback recordings
of laughter, most of which he borrowed from the dialogue
free mime sketches of the Red Skelton Variety Show. This invention,

(02:19):
which Douglas dubbed the laugh Box, resembled a modified typewriter,
with each of the three hundred and twenty keys connected
to a different kind of laugh. No longer limited to
adjusting or subtracting in studio laughs, Douglas was free to
insert the exact reaction he wanted for every scripted joke.

(02:41):
The first known use of the device was an NBC's
short lived sitcom The Hank McCune Show. It only lasted
for a single season, but the idea of the laugh
track lived on and quickly cemented itself in the new
medium of television. In those early days, TV producers embraced
the life laughbox as a way to make the viewing

(03:02):
experience more communal. After all, people were used to going
out for their entertainment, whether it be to a movie
theater or a playhouse, and having a shared reaction with
a crowd was a big part of the appeal. Canned
laughter was not the same thing, but it was convincing
enough to give viewers the sense that they weren't really
watching or laughing alone. That said, not everyone was a

(03:27):
fan of the laugh track. For example, British actor David
Niven famously hated the technique, which he found to be
disingenuous and insulting. In a nineteen fifty five interview, he'd
denounced canned laughter altogether, saying, quote, the laugh track is
the single greatest affront to public intelligence I know of,
and it will never be foisted on any audience of

(03:49):
a show that I have some say about. Other performers
took similar stands against pre recorded laughter, including Lucille Ball
and Desi Arnaz, who insisted on filming their multi camera
sitcom I Love Lucy with a live audience and real laughs.
The laugh track's adoption rate remained spotty for its first decade,

(04:12):
but that changed once the medium transition from live broadcast
to videotaping. The editing process made it harder to hide
interruptions in the audience's reactions, and canned laughter provided an
easy way to smooth things out or fill in the gaps.
Audiences also warmed up to the technique, as evidenced by

(04:32):
the many popular shows that featured it in the nineteen sixties,
including The Beverly Hillbillies, Bewitched, I Dream of Genie, and
The Andy Griffith Show, just to name a few. Even
cartoons got in on the act, with The Flintstones, The Jetsons,
and Scooby Doo all employing a laugh track, even though
it was pretty obvious that the animated shows were not

(04:54):
filmed in front of a live audience. American sitcoms became
more sophi sticated in the nineteen seventies, as shows like
All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and
MASH began to portray more nuanced characters and topical storylines. Nonetheless,
the now obnoxious laugh track remained a TV staple, although

(05:16):
the creators of Mash were at least able to talk
CBS executives into letting them leave it out of scenes
set in the operating room. By the nineteen eighties, the
technique of punctuating or sweetening sitcoms with canned laughter had
made its way across the Pond to Britain, turning up
in popular shows like Blackadder and Mister Bean. The trend

(05:38):
continued in much of the world throughout the nineteen nineties,
with shows like Cheers, Seinfeld, Frasier and Friends being no
less popular for using it. However, the laugh track's five
decades of dominance seemingly came to an end at the
close of the twentieth century. The UK's The Office ushered

(05:59):
in a new aira e of so called cringe comedy,
with many of the laughs now coming from awkward interactions
rather than traditional punchlines. TV comedies also got quippier and
faster paced in the earlier two thousands, with shows like
thirty Rock and Arrested Development delivering more jokes per minute
than ever before. Suddenly it just didn't make sense to

(06:22):
slow things down with a lot of pauses for laughter,
especially fake ones. The laugh track hasn't disappeared from television
completely since then, but in the age of streaming, it
does look increasingly out of place. Not only has the
popular style of comedy shifted to become darker and more cynical,

(06:42):
the way we engage with it has changed too. The
original aim of the laugh track was to help people
adjust to a new medium by replicating the communal quality
of the old ones, but that's not something we expect today,
especially since most shows are now available on demand and
without the need to tune in at a certain time.

(07:03):
As a result, most audiences no longer want the artifice
of canned laughter. What was once a clever trick from
a cutting edge medium is now viewed as outdated and
a little bit of a joke in its own right.
I'm gay, Blues Gay, and hopefully you now know a

(07:24):
little more about history today than you did yesterday. If
you'd like to keep up with the show, you can
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and if you have any comments or suggestions, feel free
to send them my way by writing to This Day
at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks to kazb Biased for producing

(07:46):
the show, and thanks to you for listening. I'll see
you back here again tomorrow for another day in History
class