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One man's quest to keep laughter on track shapes sitcom culture.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)
Byline: Brian McTavish
Love it or loathe it _ or just go with it _ the television laugh track remains a small-screen staple after five decades of viewer-assisted frivolity.
For that triumph or disgrace, one person can be thanked or blamed.
Charlie Douglass, who died in April at age 93, was a technical director of TV shows in the early 1950s. He noticed that studio audiences didn't laugh as much when jokes were repeated after the first take.
So the mechanical and electrical engineer, who helped develop a shipboard radar for the Navy in World War II, decided to create a "laff box" that would supply recorded audience reaction.
The original machine's diverse sounds _ including titters, belly laughs, roars, moans, cries, jeers and "oohs" and "ahhs"_ were captured at pantomime performances by Marcel Marceau and Red Skelton. That way, Douglass figured, no dialogue could mar the crowd response.
"He had this knack _ he knew how to invent things," said Bob Douglass, the son who continues to run his family's "audience reaction company," Northridge Electronics in Los Angeles.
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Source: HighBeam Research, One man's quest to keep laughter on track shapes sitcom...