In an age where sitcoms are widely celebrated, a sound that all of us have become familiar with is that of the laugh track. This familiarity is precisely the reason why we don’t feel the need to examine how it was brought about. So, before we get into the psychology that has sustained the laugh track through decades of television, it’s important to trace the phenomenon back to its origins in order to better understand how it came about and why it is still prevalent today.
The laugh track finds its origins in the Bing Crosby show, which ran from 1949 to 1952, and had distinguished itself from other radio shows at the time by being one of the only ones to be pre-recorded. This created a plethora of avenues for showrunners to explore. One instance of this is when comedian Bob Burns made a guest appearance on the show. The story goes that his contentious jokes were cut from the show but the laughter they elicited from the show’s studio audience were preserved for future use. These “canned” laughs, according to legend, constituted the first-ever laugh track. It was then wielded elsewhere in the show to boost lukewarm audience responses to tamer jokes. We then see a new character introduce himself to the scene: Charley Douglass, an audio engineer who brought the concept to television production. As a solution to the dissatisfaction he felt when the reactions provided by audiences were underwhelming at times, Douglass developed a practice called “sweetening.” In this practice, Douglass would add and subtract laughter from a show’s recording. This gave him control over the audience’s responses: he could now regulate the ebb and flow of their reactions to complement the narrative of the show. He went on to invent a device called the “laff box” to more efficiently perpetuate this practice. The anatomy of the device was as follows: it comprised a large wheel with recorded snippets of laughter attached to it, ready to augment a soundtrack at a moment’s notice.
Laugh tracks serve a dual purpose: while they might have originated as a band-aid to a disengaged audience, they were also meant to recreate a traditional theatre-like experience for at-home audiences. Now that we’ve built a rudimentary understanding of its history, we can now move on to exploring the psychology that has kept the anachronistic laugh track alive through the years. Although reactions to them have been ambivalent at best in recent years, in part due to the overuse of it by certain producers, it is still backed by surprisingly solid science. Studies have demonstrated that human beings—the conformists that they are—feel more comfortable laughing in a public environment. Simply hearing other people laugh is enough to elicit our own laughter in response. Some sitcoms therefore still invoke the laugh track, which essentially functions as a cue for the audiences at home as to when exactly to laugh. Not all shows, however, follow the same blueprint when it comes to utilising this tool. Both “Whitney” and “2 Broke Girls” tape before a live studio audience and record the audience’s chuckles, affording these shows a degree of authenticity. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have renowned shows such as “Modern Family” and “The Office” that have foregone the use of the laugh track entirely. By doing so, they grant their audiences more autonomy by allowing them to determine for themselves when the jokes are actually humorous.
The idea at the heart of the psychology behind the laugh track is most effectively captured in the words of cognitive neuroscientist Sophie Scott: “The laughter is influencing how funny the jokes seem and I think that’s because laughter is a very important signal for humans. It always means something. You’re getting information not only that it’s funny but that it’s OK to laugh.” This green light has rendered many a terrible joke into something more tolerable. For all of the ambivalence it has evoked throughout its lifespan, the reality remains that the ratings of several shows have been bolstered by the laugh track. This, coupled with the fact that it has echoed across so many of our favourite sitcoms through the years, leads us to the conclusion that television is likely to remain freighted with the joyous yet grating sound of it in the years to come.