From the L.A. Times—
Charles Rolland Douglass, who invented the TV laugh-track technology that either (a) allowed television to preserve a crucial comedic tradition or (b) condemned the sitcom to an atmosphere of artificiality, has died at 93. Douglass, who won an Emmy for his achievement, did not give interviews because he did not want to wind up in the middle of the debate, a close associate said Thursday. “He took an awful lot of flak for that,” said Carroll Pratt, a recording engineer who worked with Douglass for 30 years. “Some of it should have been pointed at the nervous producers and directors, but he was the recipient.”
Douglass, who died April 8 at a hospital in Templeton, Calif., after contracting pneumonia, invented the Laff Box — essentially a series of audiotape loops that could be controlled by a sound editor. Originally, the device was intended to simply fill in the sound holes of early '50s TV shows that re-shot scenes after the studio audience had gone home. But its use was soon expanded to exaggerate — or “sweeten” — existing laughter and to provide full-scale laughter for shows shot without a studio audience. Ultimately, the Laff Box featured hundreds of human sounds that allowed the operator to play an instrument in which the “audience” first murmured, then guffawed, then exploded with laughter. According to television lore, the original laughs and applause for the machine were stripped from an episode of “The Red Skelton Show,” said Ron Simon, a curator at the Museum of Television & Radio in New York. That show was picked because Skelton was performing in pantomime, providing a dialogue-free recording. Over the years, Douglass added more sounds.
Though it has been in existence for half a century, the Laff Box has generated scorn as well as gratitude from TV producers and writers. It helps provide needed guffaws and pacing when multiple takes at sitcom tapings have wrung the last laughs out of tired audiences. But the laugh track has been the “bane of certain elements of the creative community for many years,” said Tim Brooks, co-author of “The Complete Directory of Prime-Time Network and Cable TV Shows.” “Many feel that it degrades its art somehow,” Brooks said. “What happened is, TV is renowned for excess. It seems to be unable to constrain itself.” In the 1960s and '70s, he said, “some producers went crazy with laugh tracks and turned them higher and higher” so that people would consider a show funny “even when it wasn’t.”
Most radio comedies, such as “The Jack Benny Show,” “Burns and Allen” and “The Fred Allen Show,” featured the laughter of live audiences. But in the early days of TV, when filming and taping began, “It immediately became apparent that, if you used the same type of comic style, and nobody laughed, you were dying up there,” Thompson said. Today, several popular sitcoms not filmed in front of a studio audience — from Fox’s “Malcolm in the Middle” and “Bernie Mac” to HBO’s “Sex and the City” — forgo laugh tracks. These shows notwithstanding, the majority of sitcoms still rely on prerecorded responses. Before agreeing to bring the struggling sitcom “Watching Ellie” back for a second season, NBC insisted that it now include a laugh track.