On Second Thought

Earlier this year headlines on the obituary pages of many newspapers carried the name of Charles Rolland Douglass, who died in April at his home in Templeton, California, at the age of ninety-three. Douglass was the inventor of something that has intersected with the lives of nearly all Americans—the television laugh track.

His Laff Box, developed in the 1950s, has since evolved into a far more sophisticated instrument, capable of producing moans and groans, ooh s and aah s. The laugh track is something that elite critics of television like to ridicule for its vulgarian artifice—it somehow epitomizes the awfulness, as they see it, of television itself. But the laugh track solved a big problem. Humor is best presented, and comedy most fully experienced, in the context of a crowd. An imperfect substitute, the laugh track proved triumphant nonetheless, helping to make possible the emergence of comedy as television's finest ...