Laughing With Myself
meditations on the laugh track
I. Once in 12th grade, a guy I was half-friends with interrogated me about my laugh. “Why are you always laughing?” he asked. “Are you really laughing? Or is it fake?” He and his friend had noticed that I tended to laugh a lot at things they didn’t think were all that funny—and they weren’t buying it.
I told them I was usually laughing at something in my own head. I was laughing at situations, and maybe not the actual thing someone had said but what I thought in my head after they said it. My laughter was an expression of how I interpreted what was going on. Maybe it came off as fake, too much mirth for a teenager. But I think that despite my high school angst, I had to admit that a lot of the daily happenings were ridiculous and worthy of being laughed at. For instance: the time I tripped on the stairs in front of a sophomore who’d gotten a nickname based on his impression of a bean. As Nora Ephron said: “When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you. But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it's your laugh. So you become the hero, rather than the victim, of the joke.”
II. I just started watching How I Met Your Mother. It’s another show that everyone and their mother watched in middle school that I did not watch (also on this list: The Office, 30 Rock, etc.) and I’m finally catching up. Despite Willa’s assertion that “that show is trash,” I’ve been thoroughly enjoying it. It’s the first honest-to-goodness sitcom, with a laugh track and everything, that I’ve watched in a long time.
It’s easy to watch, it’s comforting, and I have found that there is something about the laugh track that I actually like. After watching the first season, I began to hear one isolated laugh every time the uproar of recorded laughter would play. It’s a man’s high-pitched guffaw that sounds 100% fake. I would imitate it, fake-laughing along with him. I started to think: why do I like the laugh track now?
III. According to a 1992 study by neuroscientist Robert Provine, hearing other people laugh makes us laugh, even if the laughter is from a laugh track. But our response to a prerecorded or artificial laugh has a limit: in Provine’s study of 128 undergraduates, by the 10th time they’d heard the stimulus (a laugh track), they reportedly found it “obnoxious.” This might help explain why after a while, the use of the laugh track on sitcoms went out of style.
In a 1996 study by Provine, he and a group of graduate students spent hours eavesdropping at malls, student unions, and other public spaces, recording and evaluating over a thousand “pre-laughter comments.” They observed that the majority of instances of laughter followed mundane comments that were not that funny, like “Look, it’s Andre,” or “It was nice meeting you too.” Provine published a book on laughter in 2000, which articulated some of his findings and theorized that the function of laughter is “as a social signal that bonds people and sets the tone for group gathering” (The New York Times).
When I told Gabbi I was writing a post about laugh tracks, she recommended I listen to “Laughter: The Best Medicine” from NPR’s Hidden Brain. In the episode, Sophie Scott—a British neuroscientist who studies laughter—supported Provine’s findings. “Most of the laughter that we produce,” she said, “is purely social in its origins.” Essentially, we laugh because we’re social animals, and laughter is a way of mediating situations and relationships with others. Laughter is a “universal emotion” and a way of “smoothing over a social interaction with somebody.”
We laugh based on our kinship with the other people laughing, if we like them or not. We’ll laugh with people to show that we like them, to communicate that we want them to like us. Humans are 30 times more likely to laugh when we’re with other people versus when we’re alone. This is part of why some sitcoms, like How I Met Your Mother, use a laugh track; you have a sonic cue that creates an illusion of collective experience, so you’re more likely to laugh. And if you laugh more, you should (in theory) like the show more.
In contrast, some social scientists have theorized that a laugh track can actually make you enjoy a show less. A 2016 study tested the existence of a “laugh-track paradox,” which posits that a show’s use of a laugh track can decrease viewer enjoyment because though the laugh track might make the viewer laugh or smile, it interferes with “narrative transportation.” If you know that a show is not recorded in front of a live audience and that the laughter is inserted into the soundtrack, it makes you aware that what you’re watching isn’t real. I would argue that the viewer already knows that, but nonetheless it seems fair that when you watch a TV show you want to immerse yourself in it enough to gain access, temporarily, to a world that is different from your reality. A laugh track, the study suggests, interrupts that immersion.
The authors discuss the way our brains process humor, referring to the “incongruity resolution” theory. In short: when we’re presented with an unexpected ending to a narrative, we’re surprised, and we reconsider the original narrative. Our delight lies in the mix of surprise and reevaluation, and after these few seconds of cognitive gear-turning, we enter an “affective stage of humor appreciation” otherwise known as laughing (Gillespie, 593).
Sounds like kind of a lot of work to laugh, right? The point is, though, that we are doing all of this without really being aware of the process. And a laugh track actually can work because it makes this process even easier—it lets your brain bypass the processing and get straight to the “affective stage of humor appreciation.” In other words:
The presence of simulated laughter may offer individuals an incongruity-resolution shortcut. . . By allowing consumers an opportunity to bypass the systematic processing required to resolve narrative incongruences, they may be able to better appreciate the presented humor without expending as much cognitive effort. (Gillespie, 594).
This could be why laugh-tracked sitcoms are the perfect pandemic isolation watch. We all have so little energy to expend, and when we watch TV we want to turn our brains off. A laugh track helps you do that. There is a dark side to turning your brain off, though, of course: some argue that laugh tracks are morally suspect because they get you to laugh at things you wouldn’t normally laugh at, which can affect your sense of taste and self-knowledge.
(1953 Laff Box via PBS)
IV. In 1953, sound engineer Charley Douglass created the “audience response duplicator,” which came to be known as the Laff Box. The original Laff Box was a mysterious device, a literal box that was wheeled around sets. Douglass invented it to solve a consistency issue that was becoming more prevalent as the television industry took off: when you had a live audience, their laughter was unreliable, and it needed to be supplemented and made smoother, shorter, or longer. This process of filling in the gaps is called “sweetening.”
Most (if not all) modern sitcoms “sweeten” the sound of audience laughter, but few are willing to admit to it. Sweetening—and the use of laugh tracks in general—is thought to be like a bad omen hanging over a show: if you have to do that, the show must not be funny. Producers will insist that the laughs on their shows, like Friends, are totally genuine reactions from the live studio audience. But we have to question this, too.
In “Laughing Together?: TV Comedy Audiences and the Laugh Track,” Inger-Lise Kalviknes Bore writes:
Becker notes that the use of a studio audience can be seen to contribute a sense of authenticity to sitcom production ‘because the format involves actors responding to a real audience and moving in real time through a complete scene.’ However, US sitcom actor Neil Patrick Harris rejects this idea, arguing that the presence of the live audience actually provides ‘an inauthentic environment’:
“There’s a guy there that’s telling them to laugh really loud and saying, ‘OK, everybody, this is the fourth time you’ve seen it, but remember, you’ve never heard these jokes before, and the louder you laugh the more you’ll hear yourself when you’re on TV, and here’s some chocolate.’ And so then when you go and perform as an actor, you’re getting huge reaction and response to jokes that aren’t that funny. So then your whole world is spinning because you don’t know if anything’s good or failing or really funny or not funny.” (Qtd. in Becker 5)
So what’s more genuine? A live studio audience full of fans and professional laughers or Charley Douglass’s old-timey laugh machine? When you consider the way the Laff Box worked, you may be surprised at how human it really was.
On an episode titled, “The Laff Box” Decoder Ring host Willa Paskin describes how Douglass built the machine:
Douglass then pored over these laughs at his kitchen table night after night. He spliced them into analog tape reels that can be played on a patented device Douglass had built himself out of household appliances, organ parts, and vacuum tubes. The device was about three feet tall, the shape of a filing cabinet, very heavy, and had slots for 32 reels, which could hold 10 laughs each.
The Laff Box was an orchestra of ‘canned’ human response, and for nearly a decade Douglass was the core conductor of laughter all across Hollywood. He’d sit in rooms watching shows with producers and decide which laughs to use and when. As Paskin said, “Charley Douglass wasn’t just a sound engineer, he was a psychologist.”
V. At the heart of everything here—whether a show uses a laugh track or not, whether the laughter is real or fake, and whether my own laughter in high school was “real”—is a question of likability. When the guy in my grade asked about my laughing, what he was really asking was, “Do you think I’m funny?” and by extension, “Do you like me?”
Because laughter is so vital to socializing, to forming and maintaining relationships, the concern about the authenticity of laughter becomes a concern about connection. If a show has to trick you into laughing, you may wonder if you really like the show at all. Or, if you’re like me, you’ll just sit back and enjoy the bursts of engineered laughter, and let your giggles join the chorus.