You can't can laughter

Growing up, I became close friends with Wilton Parmenter, Darrin Stephens, Tim O’Hara. I’d sit and listen to them, most afternoons after school, as they lived their lives as slightly hapless role models and anti-heroes. I admired them, not least because everyone else around them seemed to think that what they had to say was absolutely hilarious. 

Wilton, Darrin and Tim, if you aren’t a child of the sixties, weren’t real. They were afternoon sitcom fall guys on F-Troop, Bewitched and My Favourite Martin. In cosy and unthreatening scenarios, they lived lives that were a ricochet from one ‘sit’ to another. Through a developing critical eye, it was the ‘com’ bit that, for me, was pretty variable. And yet the audience guffawed, yucked, hooted, tittered consistently. I was nonplussed by this and wondered if I was destined to become Humourless Man. To compound it, in my house, my brother Matt was their near equivalent, reducing my parents to tears with his effortless jokes. My complex and long-lasting sense that I could never be funny was born then.

I think it was at the point that I started to find the jokes really off the money that I asked my mum and dad why the audience was laughing. Back then, their answer was as significant an event in my life as the Father Christmas verification. I’d begun to think that the audiences were chosen because they were kind or undiscerning or that they had been paid to laugh. Perhaps they were the actors’ parents and grandparents, laughing raucously at ‘jokes’ out of familial pride. So when Darrin marries Samantha in Bewitched, comes back from the Honeymoon, visits his Doctor and says “I’m married to a witch. A real live house-haunting, broom-riding, cauldron-stirring, card-carrying witch” and Dr Koblin replies: “You came to me for advice. I'll give you some. Now that you've had your honeymoon, why don't you take a vacation?”, I assumed that the erupting audience were partly being kind. I mean, it wasn’t a bad joke, but come on. No need to wet your pants.

Then my parents told me about canned laughter. These shows weren’t filmed in front of audiences. The laughs were added later. It felt like the door to discernment had been opened. It was finally up to me whether something was funny or not. I can’t from the distance be sure of how profound this was, but I think it resulted in a flattening of my appreciation for sitcoms that probably continued at some level for decades. I could enjoy sitcoms that were filmed in front of studio audiences, but the ones that evidently weren’t, and had the laughter added later, were deadened by this realisation.

Canned laughter, artificially applied to soundtracks, was invented by American sound engineer Charles Douglass. The ‘Douglass laugh track’ became standard in US prime-time sitcoms from the late 1950s to the late 1970s. Those audiences that often sound strangely familiar, are his work. He wasn’t the first to do it, but he was the first to industrialise it. The idea, described by recording engineer Jack Mullin, was born in post-production on the Bing Crosby show. Oddly, it was raucous laughter that caused its genesis, as he describes:

“The hillbilly comic Bob Burns was on the show one time, and threw a few of his then-extremely racy and off-color folksy farm stories into the show. We recorded it live, and they all got enormous laughs, which just went on and on, but we couldn't use the jokes. Today those stories would seem tame by comparison, but things were different in radio then, so scriptwriter Bill Morrow asked us to save the laughs. A couple of weeks later he had a show that wasn't very funny, and he insisted that we put in the salvaged laughs. Thus the laugh-track was born.”

Live audiences could not be relied on to laugh at the desired moments. On other occasions, audiences laughed too loudly or for too long. CBS sound engineer Charley Douglass noticed this, and decided to fix it. If a joke didn’t get the right reaction, Douglass inserted extra laughter. If the audience laughed for too long, Douglass muted the reaction. The technique became known as ‘sweetening’’ and ‘desweetening’.

While working for CBS, Douglass built a prototype laugh machine. It was a large, wooden wheel 28 inches in diameter, with a reel of tape glued to the outer edge of it containing recordings of mild laughs. The machine was operated by a key that played until it hit another dent on the wheel. It was built on company time and CBS claimed ownership when Douglass left. The prototype machine fell apart within months. Douglass built better and more sophisticated models.

The Douglass model, the ‘laff box’, as it was known in the industry, was more than two feet tall, secured by padlocks, and operated like an organ.

It was stored in a locked garage at the Douglass family home. Only immediate family members knew what the inside actually looked like. Since more than one member of the Douglass family was involved in the editing process, it was natural for one member to react differently to a joke than another. Charles himself was the most conservative of all, so producers would put in bids for other editors who were more liberal in their choice of laughter. Douglass used a keyboard to select the style, gender and age of the laugh as well as a foot pedal to time the length of the reaction. Inside the machine was a wide array of laughs; exactly 320 laughs on 32 tape loops, 10 to a loop. Each loop contained 10 individual audience laughs spliced end-to-end, whirling around simultaneously waiting to be cued up. Since the tapes were looped, laughs were played in the same order repeatedly. Experienced sound engineers could watch sitcoms and knew exactly which recurrent guffaws were next, even if they were viewing an episode for the first time. Frequently, Douglass would combine different laughs, either long or short in length. Attentive viewers could spot when he decided to mix chuckles together to give the effect of a more diverse audience.

He made a killing from the machine for decades. Some work has been done on the effect of this technology on viewers, but reassuringly I can’t find any evidence that it has had an adverse effect on humour glands.

The lockdown has made me think of canned laughter in several contexts. 

First, the way that chat shows have had to reorganise to survive. I listen to Loose Ends and watch the Graham Norton show most weeks, and I love them. The atmosphere on the Graham Norton show, especially, has, of course, changed. He has looked a little lost without his audience, which is entirely natural, and the great jokes he delivers or are delivered by his guests have a ‘mike check’ feel to them. All this technology is ‘packet switched’ (an almost imperceptible on off switch, which is why we can’t talk over each other online) and this makes all conversations relatives of CB radio. It would almost be more comfortable if hosts and guests said ‘over’ after they’d finished having their say. Interviewees are also somewhat at the mercy of the laughter style of their hosts. I heard someone interviewed on Loose Ends a few weeks ago and the reaction of the guest interviewer was like one of those sound dulling pads used on drum kits against what I thought was a cracking joke.

I’ve also noticed parliament. Back benchers are a form of canned laughter. Without them, a Prime Minister or Minister is less able to use a cheap gag and ride the absurd audience reaction. This is happy development.

Lastly, I’ve been finishing Netflix and Amazon Prime and have been bingeing Succession. No laughter track, which of course, is now the norm, but there’s something else about Succession. Like no other series I can think of recently, it makes you feel as you are in each excruciating room. The discomfort of the characters is shared in a way that is, well there’s no other word really, palpable. And I’ve laughed at it, uncontrollably. The bird scene in the restaurant with Tom and Greg is a masterpiece. No signposts, no ‘laugh here’ cues. The real deal. 

Maybe laughter is at its most heightened at the crumbling cliff edge of the pit of discomfort. Certainly this time away from any cues or signposts has found me laughing more than I have in a long time.  I’ve schadenfreuded at the Prime Minister. I’ve filled the silence on sitcoms. I’ve spotted situational comedy in the real world in a way that I haven’t for a while. (Does anyone else find that there’s more to NOTICE these days?) I remember a standup saying that the art of a joke is sharing a secret and undisclosed truth with a member of the audience. Without decrying the importance of live performance and audiences, perhaps we’ve unwittingly been seduced and numbed into some sort of humour limbo. What we find funny is personal, not tribal. It is also, and this is really worth noting, memorable.