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Sunday, April 27, 2003

Early TV Laughed on Cue

By Leanne Potts
Of the Journal
    Let's hear it for the guy who changed prime-time TV more than Rachel and Farrah's hair and Lucy and Desi's baby combined, a man who worked his magic behind the camera in techie anonymity.
    Let's hear it for Charles (Charlie) Rolland Douglass, the sound engineer who perfected the laugh track, for without him we would not have known "The Love Boat" was a comedy.
    Douglass died of pneumonia April 8 in Laguna Beach, Calif., his son Bob said Wednesday. He was 93.
    Honoring the man who gave us canned laughter is easier than you think, for the simple reason that the sound of those strangers laughing out there, somewhere, made you feel less alone as you sat in front of your TV. The laugh track guided you through Jack Tripper's double entendres and Archie Bunker's lunk-headed bigotry.
    Laugh at this. Groan here. This is a poignant moment, so be silent.
    The laugh track was socialization through TV. It also provided the punch for humor that had its origins in front of live vaudeville audiences.
    What seems far funnier than the laugh track is how it has come to be reviled.
    "A lot of people think the laugh track is the scourge of TV, that it's an insult to our intelligence to be told when to laugh," said Professor Robert Thompson, director of the Center for Popular Television at Syracuse University.
    "But you needed it. Most of the early TV comedy was done in an old kind of style — 1-2-3 laugh. The laughter was key to the timing."
    Thompson admits the laugh tracks could at times get weird. "I always loved the one on 'The Love Boat,' '' he says. "Where was the laughing audience — around the ship in lifeboats?"
    Douglass didn't talk to the media much, preferring to let his laugh tapes speak for him. According to obituaries, he got his start at television's dawn in the 1950s as a technical director for several live shows at the fledgling CBS TV network.
    Daily Variety reported that his family fled Guadalajara to escape unrest caused by Pancho Villa. Around 1953, the Mexican-born Douglass built the Laff Box, a machine that could mix several tape loops of laughter into a single laugh track that sounded real — at least to 1950s ears.
    The remarkable thing was that Douglass could use his Laff Box to tailor the laughs to fit any mood: he could give you titters, male laughs, female laughs, gasps. He could even throw in a lone "wacky laugh" here and there to make it sound spontaneous.
    Douglass' Laff Box worked so well, he was able to start his own company, Northridge Electronics, that has provided laugh tracks to the networks for a half century.
    For the first part of that run, Charlie Douglass had no competitors; his taped laughter ruled the networks from "The Dick Van Dyke Show" to "The Brady Bunch." It was Douglass' laughter you heard when Ellie Mae walked out with a monkey hanging from her hip on "The Beverly Hillbillies."
    Where did the laughs come from? TV history is fuzzy on that point, but it is believed Douglass recorded his laugh tapes at Red Skelton mime sketches so no dialogue would interfere with the laughter.
    Douglass used those same tapes for decades (until the advent of stereo TV forced him to re-record his canned laughter.)
    By the 1970s, laugh tracks had come to be reviled by a TV audience (and TV producers) who thought canned laughter was hokey.
    "TV got more ambitious," Thompson says. "You had shows like 'M*A*S*H' and 'All in the Family' that aspired to be more than just sitcoms."
    At the height of the laugh track backlash, two 1980s sitcoms, "The Slap Maxwell Story" and "United States" aired without taped mirth, Thompson says. "Both failed, largely due to the lack of a laugh track," he adds. " 'United States' was dead in two months."
    The development of shows like "Malcolm in the Middle" and "The Wonder Years," which didn't rely on the bada-bing rhythm of humor, has gotten rid of the need for laugh tracks in some cases. And technology has made it cheaper to film shows in front of live, laughing studio audiences, Thompson says.
    That doesn't mean the laugh track has gone the way of Esso commercials and TVs with big picture tubes poking out of the back.
    There are still jokes that fall flat on shows like "Friends." When laughs aren't as loud as a producer likes, they "sweeten" the response later with laughs from a laptop computer, the modern incarnation of Charlie Douglass' Laff Box.
    Sweetening. That's the industry term for sprinkling a little digitized laughter on a live audience response.
    I prefer to think of it as an intimation of immortality, courtesy of Charlie Douglass.