Say Douglass wanted a light chuckle, someone laughing too early, or even someone not getting the joke but laughing anyway – there were buttons for each of those sounds.ĭouglass monopolised the market for the laugh track, adding canned laughter to just about every sitcom on TV throughout the 60s and 70s. It contained tape loops with various recorded snippets of laughter which could be controlled with a keyboard. The ‘Laff Box’ could be compared to a mellotron or a modern day sampler. To counter this problem, he built the prototype of what would eventually become his genre-defining ‘Laff Box’. They were first conceived in 1953 by sound engineer Charley Douglass who found real studio audiences laughed at the wrong moments, didn’t laugh enough or laughed too much.
It’s fallen out of favour in recent years but artificial laugh tracks have been an essential part of the TV sit-com for over half a decade.
