Continuing the discussion from He made it! (Dick Van Dyke is 100 on 2025-12-13):
The above got me wondering about the history of the laugh track.
My thought had always been that it began as recorded laughter added in to the live studio audience response when the live response was not felt to be … enough … and morphed into the primary if not only laughter broadcast. Studio audience need not apply.
But I suspect someone here actually knows.
According to the Wikipedia page about the laugh track, Bing Crosby pre-recorded a radio show with hillbilly comic Bob Burns sometime in the 1940s. Burns got massive amounts of laughter for his jokes, but they couldn’t use the jokes, because they were at the time too racy for radio.
A couple weeks later, Crosby had another guest on who wasn’t nearly as funny, and Crosby’s scriptwriter Bill Morrow insisted that they insert the laughs from Burns’s appearance.
Experimental at first, despised in the end.
Laughter is contagious, and if there’s a gag in what Dick just said, his delivery of it might be enough for a few chuckles. The TV execs found out that people at home were even less likely to get a gag from a small TV and not seeing Dick Van Dyke in person.
I see ekedolphin has provided the genesis of it. And for years it was a few ‘tracks’ so often you’ll hear the same woman laugh in a unique way.
Larry Gelbart (MASH) hated it, yet there it was. Hawkeye said something humorous. Ha ha! He’s funny!
Normal Lear hated it. Tihis is why you hear “All in the Family was filmed before a live audience.” No laugh tracks. I suppose not even (!) if a joke fell flat. Dunno if all of his shows were like that, yet sometimes if you want to make a show the Network Execs call the shots.
Glad it’s gone now.
(ETA: Likely the cause of the early demise of Police Squad! which at least went on to do a couple (Naked Gun) movies. Was that a joke? I don’t know what to do!)
Look up videos on the “Laff Box”. It’s the machine that generated the laugh track for just about every sitcom in the 60s and 70s.
I had an interesting experience involving laugh tracks. I was working in the promotion department of a TV station that aired MeTV on its secondary channel. MeTV ran “Gilligan’s Island” at the time. We had an intern from another country. I asked her to watch a few episodes and note some of the funny parts so I could make a promo.
She came back a day or so later totally perplexed. She said she didn’t understand why the “audience” laughed at every little thing, especially since she couldn’t understand what was funny in a lot of the stuff they were laughing about. I explained to her that on sitcoms of that time period, there was no “audience,” that the laughter was added later in production. She was flabbergasted. She had never heard of such a thing. (Culturally speaking, I was naive in thinking she would even understand a 50-year-old American sitcom.)
But I could see her point. When I watch an old show on occasion I find laugh tracks to be annoying. Too often, they were used all out of proportion, as a crutch to hide lame writing.
Every cite says I Love Lucy didn’t use a laugh track but I would swear I hear Desi laughing even when he is in the scene,
Yes, you could hear Desi’s distinctive laugh, but that wasn’t a laugh track, he was just off camera and the mics were picking it up. At least that’s what I’ve always assumed. I don’t even think it was intentional.
But I hear him laughing at scenes he is in. I suspect the laughter was recorded when those scenes were played back for an audience that included the cast and crew. I guess that’s not technically a laugh track.
Not completely. Disney Channel’s live action teen angst shows are permeated with canned laughter!
And they have it laugh at the dumbest things. Data’s audience is more discerning!
That I don’t remember (but I haven’t watched the show regularly in decades). In my mind, he was always off camera laughing at Lucy’s antics. But, again, it’s been probably 30 years since I watched it on any kind of a regular basis.
Normally I’m not a fan, but I think it worked for The Flintstones.
MASH settled with having a “chuckle” track instead, with no chuckling or laughing in the O.R.
My wife likes TikTok, it is not gone, at least they are recent real laughs, but funny audio laughs (like baby meme one) are terminally annoying after many videos abusively reuse it.
A review of the sitcom The Hank McCune Show in a 1950 issue of Variety described the first known use of a laugh track on TV: “Although the show is lensed on film without a studio audience, there are chuckles and yucks dubbed in."
I listened to a fascinating podcast about the laugh track about a year ago. It’s the Decoder Ring podcast. I’ve tried four times now to post a link but no matter what I do the link goes to the wrong video. Search YouTube for “Decoder Ring Laff Box”.
There’s a big difference between a mechanically created laugh track and the laughter from a live studio audience. But nowadays they are commonly confused.
When I saw the thread I immediately thought of the above announcement-made by Rob Reiner himself, when yes the AitF team was striving to move beyond mere laugh tracks.
I then casually peruse some other threads, and see this one:
Actually, to correct myself, despite this tragedy, AitF was one of the first to use videotape. So instead of “filmed” it’s “recorded on tape”, using a multiple-camera setup, where most sitcoms used one with the laugh track. Also, after all these years, I did not know that was his voice.
“I Love Lucy” was filmed before a studio audience, but there certainly was some sweetening done in post-production. How many times did we hear that unknown woman say “uh oh” when Lucy was hatching some hairbrained scheme?
In the Book “Cu;t TV” it was reported that that famous “Uh oh” was Lucille Ball’s mother Dede Ball, who attended every taping of the show.
