BrainStuff Classics: How Do Laugh Tracks Work?

I'm Christian Saga and this is brain Stuff. Do you remember how sitcoms used to lay in those horrible laugh tracks after every joke, including cartoons, like just in case the jokes weren't insulting your intelligence, they had to go to you with taped laughter, like they're running the faucet to get somebody with a shy bladder to pee. I can't believe this, but some shows are still doing it. Why Well, back before recordings and radio and TV, all

performances were live. This meant actors always had the benefit of a crowd's reacts to drive their performance, and the audience reaped the benefits of that energy to pension during a sad moment, a collective gasp at a revelation, or mass laughter when something funny happened. Broadcasts and recordings, however, brought these performances to a wider audience, but some of that energy got lost in the transition. Every show couldn't involve a crowd, and you couldn't always rely on an

audience to have the right reaction. They might be too loud or too quiet, or they might not laugh at all after say the fifth take of a joke. So in the late forties and early fifties, radio and TV engineers began sweetening audience reactions, mixing them to sound more appropriate. This became a huge trend in the industry. When Charlie Douglas invented the original laugh box. It looked sort of like a typewriter, but contained three hundred and twenty laughs

and other audience noises. The noises were grouped by type of response into already two loops of tape, each activated by a single key. You played it like an organ. You'd select the style, age, and gender of the response you wanted by pressing one or more keys. Then you'd use a foot pedal to control the sound level. Supposedly, Douglas recorded these original noises at Marcel Marceau and Red Skeleton shows, totally pantomime parts to make sure he'd get

a clean tape of just the audience. These days, laugh tracks are digital and they contain lots of sounds, though if you watch any particular sitcom, you've probably heard distinctive laughs repeat, which brings me to my next point. Industry critics and creators alike hate laugh tracks. Pretty much everybody who stops to think about them hates them. But do they work? You bet they do. Have you ever seen one of those YouTube videos where they take a popular

sitcom and remove the laugh track. It turns into this creepy nightmare world where people say to pressing things to each other and then pause for three seconds. Without the laugh track, you realize the jokes aren't necessarily funny, you're just laughing along with some invisible crowd. One theory says that we feel social pressure to conform to the group. Another suggest laughter is an automatic neurological response, something a

little more hardwired. Either way, real research going back decades shows that laugh tracks work. In nineteen seventy four, a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showed empirically that people were more likely to laugh at jokes that were supplemented with a laugh track. In fact, with a laugh track you might not even need the joke. In neuroscientist Robert Provine showed that test subjects smiled and laughed in response to an electronic track that wasn't even

attached to a narrative. They were just reacting to the laughter itself. But provines results wore off after repeated tests. By the tenth round, subjects stopped laughing along and reported that they found the taped laughter obnoxious. So okay, laugh tracks do seem to influence the audience, but there are tons of factors that moderate this. For example, what if

you're consciously aware that the laughters canned? Study in ninet found that people who thought the sound was coming from a live audience were more influenced by it than people who were aware that it was artificial. Or what if you don't think you'd get along with the people who

were laughing? In two thousand five, a paper published by the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that college students laughed less and rated a taped comedian lower when they thought that the tape laughter they heard was coming from members of a political party they disagreed with. But laughing

in response to hearing laughter may be involuntary. In two thousand six, research yours at the University College London used f m R I to discover that human vocal sounds activated part of the brain called the pre motor cortical region, which primes our facial muscles to react. That means that when subjects heard laughing, they began to smile. Some theorists think that gestures and sounds like laughter predated speech. Could

our vulnerability to laughter actually be a survival mechanism. Today's episode was produced by Tyler Clang and written by Joe McCormick and I for Brainstuff's YouTube series. If you enjoy our show and want to support us in return for some brainy house wears or people wears, visit our online shop at t public dot com, slash brain stuff, and of course, for more on this and lots of other good humored topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com