Laughing Record

who has heard a lot of records. Ian's label, Canary Records, puts out all kinds of ephemeral material, most of which he has personally researched. In Season one, our episode Diaspora covered his work preserving the music and stories of Ottoman Empire refugees working in the early recording industry of the United States in Canary. Rereleased the subject of today's program,

the Okay Laughing Record. If you were going to explain to somebody very quickly what the Okay Laughing Record is, It's a side of a record where people laugh for three minutes, and that's it. Basically. I've listened to it hundreds and hundreds of times. There isn't that shock of the novel that happens the first time you listen to it for me anymore. But you play it for other people, and some people will immediately get it and laugh along

and just love it with all their hearts. Other people, and it's not at all uncommon we'll get freaked out and go, yeah, no, I don't like that at all, Like, please don't make me listen to that again. That was uncomfortable for me. We will play the Okay laughing record and you can make up your own mind about it. But first, some thoughts on the nature of laughter, something about it being disembodied. I think not having people to look at when you're hearing them laugh can be disconcerting.

We have this idea of maniacal laughter, the laugh that comes from somewhere that isn't spontaneous, the villain's evil laugh, and movie everybody recognizes that sound as being menacing, scary, the sense of like, I don't know why you're laughing now, I'm not laughing, This isn't funny. There is also such a thing as laughing yoga. People will get up at dawn and go outside and look into the sky and just laugh for you know, ten or fifteen or twenty

minutes or something. That creeps me out. Because it seems really inauthentic. You know, they're they're making themselves laugh, and you kind of go, that doesn't sound like a real laugh to me. What is that? This tie between uncanniness and disembodied sound has a basis in biology. People have been programmed for thousands and thousands of years that if there's a sound, that sound has got to be coming from something. That's what our ears and our brains are

wired to understand. The point of listening is to know that if there's a bear coming up behind you, that sound means bear and you should run. I must be going now. It's not coincidental that the other purpose of the ears is to keep your balance. My voice should be in your right ear at this moment. If not, turn your headphones around so that you are hearing my voice in your right ear. Your ears are there spatially

and know what's going on in the atmosphere. So it was a brand new thing at the end of the nineteenth century for people to experience disembodied sound. Early sound recording was a little disconcerting to people, but it was also magical. It was like, can you believe that there's the sound of a person singing in your house when

clearly there is no one there. Blew people's minds, and the world was still kind of in that state when this record came out the way Ian tells it, the okay laughing record, this little seventy eight put out is the stuff of legend. Crazy thing is it was a huge, huge, runaway, monster hit, and it's stayed in print off and on, but more or less continuously for like thirty years. It was a really ubiquitous record. Everybody had one. The way that I first encountered it is just digging around in

boxes of seventy eight. You just run into it over and over again. I wound up buying like five or six copies over the course of a couple of years. The question becomes not just what is it and how did it become such a big hit, but why do we know so little about it? At this juncture, it's worth asking a question that seems deceptively simple. What is the function of laughter? What? What's new? Boutland? I thought

you might need some new jokes to a program. Well, don't tell me that you have contrived some specimens of waggery. How far back do you want to go? Because laughing is so human. Did you hear about the soldiers who ate five dozen oysters and got the judge from the army a five dozen oysters and got this jodge from the army. Yes, he had sixteen points. There aren't any human beings on earth that don't laugh. Fine, it wouldn't

work with their claims, would it. Although according to legend, there are a few characters of note that were so called agel lasts, individuals who never or almost never laugh. Scientists have a name for this thing. They call it inertia. It's been claimed that Sir Isaac Newton laughed only once in his life on the subject of geometry. Sir Isaac Newton figured all that out a long time ago, so that leaves us reader see for ourselves what it all means.

It's a natural human animal sound. It's just something that evolutionarily we do. And there's this idea that laughing is contagious. There are even stories of laughter and cutting mass hystereo, like the Tank and Yeka laughter epidemic, in which uncontrollable laughter spread through the student body at a Tanzania boarding school then into the neighboring villagers, infecting an estimated one thousand people. Purportedly some laughed as long as sixteen days.

Our brains are wired so that when we hear somebody laughing, we tend to laugh along. There are many examples of songs going way back that include bits of laughing in them. Laughing song. The end of one of William Blake's songs of Innocence end of the eighteenth century includes a bit where it goes, ha ha he at the end to move and be merry and join with me to sing the sweet chorus of ha ha he that all Strouse's deflator Mouse in the end of the nineteenth century has

a laughing song in it, So excuse me. There's an American Prairie composers song from a book in eight nine that has a laughing song with a ha ha ha refrain in it, sung in four parts. Fast forward to the turn of the twentieth century, around the advent of recorded sound, when the record business starts. What happens very quickly is that there's a VHS Beta Max format. War The first recording format that's marketed to people is the wax cylinder that Edison is putting out, and the machines

are really nice and they're expensive. Within about five ten years a German immigrant named Emil Berliner in Washington, d C. Comes out with a different technology that records owned on discs. Berlinard's invention was called the gramophone. They're cheaper and anybody can afford one. Relative to the cylinder machines. What happens is the same thing that happens in the VHS Betamax war. The cheaper one wins out. Part of the reason for that is that there's a broader catalog of material for

the cheaper device. Edison had social requirements for the music that he was releasing. He was functionally deaf and literally had kind of no ear from music. He wasn't the music guy. But the Berliner format starts releasing tons of stuff that people just like, normal around the house kind of music, and he takes a bunch of chances on interesting, odd other kinds of performances. The very early on the end of the nineteenth century, he puts out a disk

of people imitating barnyard sounds. You know, there's no bird in the room, and yet you hear the sound of a bird, and it's novel and exciting, and it kind of puts you in a different space. Auditorially. One of the first big hit records in the history of records is a laughing Song. It also happens to be the first record ever made by an African American person. The guy named George W. Johnson, who was actually born enslaved in first records, called the Laughing Song. The deal was

with the technology at the time. You would go in and cut the disc, and the material that is used to stamp multiple copies of it would wear out pretty quick. So if you had a big hit record, after you'd pressed a few hundred copies, the stamper would wear out and you'd have to have the artist come back in

and re record the piece over again. So George W. Johnson winds up going in and recording the Laughing Song a dozen times or more over a decade, and it's such a big hit that, surprise, surprise, some white guy comes along, takes the song, re records it, and that becomes an even bigger hit. Bert Shepherd records a Laughing Song for the gramophone company Berlinard's Company, and that record

sells like millions of copies all over the world. It was clear right away in the recording business, laughing songs are working from a marketing standpoint. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the laughing song motif was translated into the most popular musical forms of the day. In the United States, there are a gazillion instances of

recordings that either include laughing or imitate laughing. For instance, there's an English music hall song that's a rip off of the George W. Johnson Laughing record, with new lyrics written into a couple laughing Policeman an old late three and that's a huge runaway hit on its own. Two. There's a skit in nineteen ten called the Laughing Spectator, Mac, where's your partner? Why he's not here? But tapert that after I get through eleven minutes litten, Hello, Mike, how

are you really? What's the matter? Mac? You look upset? I am upset me bank buston, and I lost me balance. There's a record called laughs you have Known. It's also like a vaudeville type skit. First of all, there's the laugh hella you're dear laugh now this laugh needs no introduction at all. The Plantation Jazz Orchestra and Henry Raderman both record a song called make that Trombone laugh between the Louisiana Five, Powell's Jazz Monarchs and hound Head. Henry

All records songs called Laughing Blues. Guitarist named Sam Moore records a laughing rag in Boys Smick covers. And then in the sheet music ragtime era, you've got Laughing Hyena. Chilly Wilmorton records the Hyena, Stump, Laughing Lucas, the horse laugh, the hilarity rag. You get the idea. It was a genre and it was popular. It was part of the mood of the time in America in the nineteen twenties.

It's in that context that the Okay Laughing Record is released in the United States in about August two, it comes out. It was recorded for a record company in Berlin, Germany called Becca Records, early mid ninety. When the record starts, there is a horn player, there's a cornet playing a song. Turns out the song is called alstare yogen Zite. In my younger days, it's like a middle of the nineteenth

century kind of sweet, nostalgic, kind of schlocky song. And then a woman starts laughing, and then another guy starts laughing, and then the cornet player is trying to get through this performance, but can't keep his lips on the horn, and he starts laughing too while he's playing. That makes them laugh more. And then the whole thing is this breakdown of hilarity of laughter where all of them are laughing and the trumpet players trying to make it through

the performance, and it's really it just falls apart. So to summarize, the performer is interrupted by rising laughter until he can't go on. That's the original. And in order to understand the Okay Laughing Record, Number one is that when it became a huge hit in the US, there were a bunch of knockoffs. There were a bunch of imitations. All of those knockoffs included one significant change in every American version of that basic structure. The trumpet player makes

a mistake. He starts playing and then breaks a note, and that causes the woman to begin laughing. That doesn't happen on the Okay Laughing Record. There is no thing that she begins laughing at, and it has driven people crazy for a long time. Why does she start laughing? Well, you gotta look at Germany. Between nineteen fourteen and two million Germans were killed in World War One, five million more were wounded. Seven million people for casualties of World

War one, fully percent of the total population. And then end of nineteen eighteen through all of nineteen nine there's a revolution. They overthrow the monarch and found the New Republic. Six continuous years of war and upheaval and terrible suffering, the entire country was grieving when that cornet player begins playing aus their yogen site, this schlocky, sentimental, old war horse song that everybody probably knew, this bit of nostalgia for a world lost and more innocent time in my

younger days. It's in the context of a world that had gone completely bonkers. And that's why she starts laughing, because if somebody's playing this trite, nostalgic glibe bit of nonsense in the context of actual pain and suffering, it's crazy to play that stupid song. The conceit might seem absurd. Perhaps that's the point right then, that particular moment in Germany, end of the team's beginning of the twenties is when

data happens. Raoul Helsman had just come up with the first sound poem F M S w B, which is just a collection of sounds for formed as poetry. That current that. Immediately after that, kirch Vitters does the ersat Baby, the Baby, but he spents ten years on it, but he starts and that's again sound poem, just a collection of sounds. Glim blim blim bim bim blim blim blim bim bim ua or look at the baby, or look at the baby, or look at the baby like that

at the baby rom to. He said to the thing with Data was that it was anti aesthetic, It's not pretty, and it was a direct reaction to the craziness of World War One, to the fact that everything was meaningless. Valeska Girt was also a really brilliant performer around that time, dancer, actress, performance artist does this piece Pause, where you know, she gets up on stage and just stands there and that's

the dance. Also in the twenties, around that time, she comes up with a piece called Baby, where she says that she used her body to record the sounds of babies and then gets up and sounds exactly like a baby. That's what's going on in Berlin and at the Team's speakinning of the twenties, people are reacting to all of this just madness and the breakdown of humanity and civilization in the world after six years of machine guns and

tanks and trench warfare and chemical weapons. Meanwhile, that August, this Newish record company called Okay Records, run by a German immigrant, releases this German recording without any credit. Doesn't say who's on it, doesn't say who actually performs it. A lot of people have looked, a lot of people have tried to figure it out, and it's really still not clear. The Library of Congress's National Registry inducted the Okay Laughing Record is a significant recording that will be

preserved indefinitely by the American federal government. There was an accompanying essay that was written by a guy named Carrie O'Dell when it was inducted in two thousand three, and in that he gives this one account of who might have been the performers on it. He thinks that the woman who's laughing is an opera singer named Luci Bernardo, and that the other guy who's laughing is Auto rath Key.

I'm not really sure where he got that. It's just, you know, it's just a story that circulates Felix Silber's is apparently the cornet player. There's also the possibility that the performers are two significant comedians of Germany in the nineteen teens, twenties, thirties. Carl Valentine is a extraordinary person, and it's possible that he was involved. It's sort of in his style and of his time. What Carl Valentine was a guy that had been born two in Munich.

He was a skeletally thin, long, absurdist performer who for forty years was performing in cabarets and theaters and circuses and stuff, along with his regular performing partner, who he gave the name Lezel carl Stadt. Extraordinary people, really absurdist, dark stuff that they were doing. They were actually banned by the Nazis in the nineteen thirties for their comedy having a quality of being defeatist, So it kind of makes sense that it might have been them, but we

really just don't know. Two years after Becca released the Laughing Record in Germany, it was reissued for an American audience. The record comes out in the US on this little independent record label, little upstart label in New York City called Okay, and they just call it the Okay Laughing Record with no credits Summer August thereabouts. Strange thing is it takes off. There's a bunch of evidence that the record just sold like hotcakes, particularly through that Christmas. It

was like a big n Christmas gift. Okay ran lots of ads for it in newspapers and stuff, and individual stores furniture stores mostly also ran ads encouraging people to buy it. End of twenty two, beginning of twenty three. I'll read to some of the ad copy from some of these. A riot of fun, laughs, gurgles, chuckles at every turn of the disk, a riot of laughter five turns of the disc, and the most doleful undertaker grims like a young bride. The bill collector scowls. Turn on

the Okay Laughing Record. He'll try to lend you money. Already it's saying that it's gonna like cure heartache and cure financial trouble, cure with a laugh. We just received our second order of Okay Laughing Records, good for grouchiness, blues, headaches, cramps or gouts each. That's one of the other things about the Okay Laughing Record. Records were a dollar across the board generally speaking, Okay Laughing records. It's a bargain. All right, here's my favorite one. Are you sad? Are

you blue? Are you downhearted? Are you despondent? Are you in trouble? Are you melancholy? Are you peeved? Are you gloomy? Are you married? Here the Okay Laughing Record, and you will recover it plays on any phonograph. Are You married? That was not official Okay Records copy, by the way, that was just a little local ad put in a newspaper by a furniture store. What if the steak is cold, what if the coffee just isn't Turn on the Okay Laughing Record. It's a better cure than Manion ever had.

I had to look up Minion and it turns out Manions is a brand of patent medicine that was mostly alcohol or prohibition. So basically, that's the equivalent of somebody putting out a record now and saying, listen to this record. It's better than medical marijuana. Yeah, it will actually cure you. It's a better cure. The Okay's release was a big success in late the succeeding years would cement the records legacy. What happens when you have a runaway hit record or

a hit movie or something. Number one sequels. A one proud civilization now had to place its trust and hope in Godzilla and it's power Robot Man. We've got this formula, we think works, people want it. We need to put

on another. Giants against Giants and the Most November four two, there's a record by the Riga Orchestra recorded for Okay and they released that as the Okay Laughing Dance Record right away, and then by Januar they come up with a catalog number for the Okay Laughing Record number two, and then after sales start dwindling, April, they put out the Okay Crying Record. Now, like most sequels, each one was less of a hit than the previous one. But the Okay Crying Record, I mean, that's insane. It is

what it says. It is. It's three minutes of people crying. It was not a hit. I spent ten years trying to get my hands on one. It was number one on my wish list for a decade. Finally got one on eBay, paid through the nose Man thirty bucks. I paid for the Okay Crying Record because I mean, it's crazy. Can you imagine going over someone's house and they're sitting

there listening to three minutes of people crying? I mean, did the people at the record company not get that the reason the Okay Laughing record worked was because it made you feel good? What were they thinking? And then what's even crazier than that is exactly the same time Okay comes out with a crying record, another knockoff company puts out their own crying record. There are two crying records that come out in the United States. Nobody wanted them.

And on the flip side of the knockoff crying record, there's a performance called contagious coughs. So they get that there's a structure you can do where you've got a musical performance and somebody starts doing something and it's infectious, and then people will buy that record that does that, right, So they try to achieve that success with coughing. I would describe coughing as emotionally neutral or kind of annoying.

It's not a fun record, and it's not a good idea, but that's how you know they had caught lightning in a bottle and they're trying to put out something else that people might want, and they're casting around in the dark and just guessing about it. In a sea of laughing records, Okay remains the gold standard. At least six other American versions of the Okay Laughing Record come out,

made by different performers. They all followed the same story. Sure, there's a musical performance, almost always a horn at the beginning, then they insert the broken note to cause her to start laughing, and then a man and woman laugh for the rest of the side. I have listened to them all, and I can tell you none of them are as good as the Okay Laughing Record. The Okay Laughing Record. There's something about the way those two laugh that feels authentic.

It feels good. And all of the other laughing records that follow that structure that come out, yeah, I don't buy it. I just don't really think those people are laughing. I think they're doing ah. You know that it's not laughing, And you can tell the difference. It's one of the thing is about records. You can hear it in somebody's voice when they're authentic, really good singer, You believe them.

It turns out it's the same thing with Laughing Records anyway, So the Okay Laughing Records sells tons of copies, stays in print through all the nineteen twenties into the nineteen thirties, and then by the time you get to the thirties and well the depths of the depression, it's kind of old hat. You know, people aren't really wanting laughing records anymore by the middle of the nineteen thirties, and it kind of just fades away, you know, just sits around

in people's houses. But then during after World War two, generation of comedians comes up who had been little kids in the nineteen twenties and they remember the Okay Laughing Record and how great it was. And so there are two examples I can think of off the top of my head where you've got brilliant, brilliant comedians who are doing this like blown out, over the top, surreal, crazed humor, and they do cover versions, they do new imaginings of

the Okay Laughing Record. The first example is Spike Jones and his City Slickers, who were you know, enormously popular, doing this um comic combination of like cornpone humor with this over the top, crazy surrealist, frenetic energy. So they do the Jones Laughing Record. It follows basically the same structure as the Okay Laughing Record. You get a horn solo at the beginning, and then it breaks down and people start laughing like crazy and keep laughing through the

rest of the side. But being Spike Jones, it's not a sweet, sad, sentimental song. It's the flight of the Bumblebee. It's really really great. Jones grew up then he remembered the Okay Laughing Record and how well it worked. Same generation, you got another guy who's a huge comedy star and had a great career going who was a cartoon director.

Tex Avery. Avery is most associated with the Golden Age of Mary Melody and Looney Tunes cartoons, and famous for, alongside voice actor Mel Blaine, creating the characters of Bugs, Bunny, Daffyda, timber Fun and Porky the Pig. Tex Avery makes a cartoon called He invents a plot for this cartoon, which is about a guy who's got like a a nervous condition. Mr Triddle, you are very sick man. You have a serious case of trombonnosis. He goes to a hotel where he can just sit and be quiet for a while.

And then in the next room there's a trumpet player, a man and a woman in these gales of hilarity. And he actually uses the Okay Laughing Record in its entirety as the soundtrack to the second half of the cartoon. It's just the Okay Laughing Record plays it all the way through. But but again you can hear he re recorded the first three seconds or so so that the cornet player playing I'll stare jrgensite misses a note and gives her a reason to laugh. It's a new recording.

You can hear actually the surface noise of the old seventy eight fade in. There's a cross fade or he brings in the original recording. But he had to give some reason for her to laugh. Will you please stop blowing that more? Because Americans never got it. They never

understood the actual meaning of that first last. The result, though, is that this new generation in the es and fifties of kind of a surrealist, over the top American humorists, mad magazine folks and whatever remember the Okay Laughing Record, and it gets reissued and comes out as a forty five winds up staying in print for you know, a bunch more years. It was a bunch more copies to it, totally new generation. So it's a it's a it's a funny thing. It's it's a genre. But it's also one

of a kind. Considering how effective it was and for some people still is, it is kind of extraordinary that there aren't more examples of it in circulation now. I mean, you really don't have laughing records anymore. Just kind of went away mhm. Partially, the whole business of sound being disembodied is not as novel anymore. Yeah, there's some kind of loss of innocence. I don't quite understand. But but it's a jewel. It's a jewel. When do you put

on the laughing record? When are you like, oh, this is what I'm gonna go home and listen to. Oh jeez. Always in groups. I never put it on by myself. It's always when I want to share something with someone and we can kind of look each other in the eye, and you know, that's when I really laugh out loud. Is you know, being with somebody and having them get it and getting it with them and sharing that experience. Yeah, Yeah, it's always with somebody. I've played it a lot at shows.

I couldn't go around sometimes and give talks, And for years it was my my closing piece. Can tell some of the story and then play it for the audience. And I've I've watched audiences many times. Um some sit dead, silent and just wait it out, really just look at me like why are you doing this? And then other times you have people who just feel better and are ready to just go along with it, who have a

I don't know, just an easier laugh. You know that's it's easier to trigger for them, are more absurd sense of you know how crazy it is? It depends m m m m hm oh ye. Ephemeral is written, assembled by Much, and produced by Matt Frederick, Trevor Young, and Max Williams. Special thanks this episode to John Deveka. Today's conversation was based on the compilation A Better Cure, A Brief History of the Okay Laughing Record and It's progeny.

Explore the collection and everything else. I Agsky is up to at Canary Dash Records dot bandcamp dot com, and check in with us too over at Ephemeral dot Show. Next time on Ephemeral. We arrived at Harvard to go through Peter's our eyes. To Harvard's credit, they had at least put everything in boxes. Once opening those containers, though, there was just no organization whatsoever. It was like Peter's

brain overflowing. There was sheet music, magazine clippings, tapes, vhs, cassettes, stoodles, notebooks, just a really random assortment of ephemera. The first couple of days was more of a psychological gestation phase. What am I walking into? What am I contending with? Here?

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