Can the Laughter

When the cameras stopped grinding recently on an installment of I Love Lucy, Co-Star Desi Arnaz turned to thank the studio audience for its laughter during the filming of the show. Slipping up from behind, Lucille Ball crowned her husband with a pizza and the audience exploded. "That was the best laugh of the evening," chirped one spectator. "It should have been on the show." Chances are that it was--or will be. The laugh was captured on tape for Desilu Productions' library of canned laughter, from which the sound tracks of the company's shows can borrow anything from a solitary snicker to waves of mass hilarity.

Canned laughter rings, too often like hollow mockery, through virtually every filmed comedy show on TV. It is a hoary part of show business, at least as old as Nero who, in his ventures as an actor, packed his houses with as many as 5,000 soldiers under strict orders to appreciate him. The French refined it with the institution of the claque, with such specialists as rieurs* or laughers. In the heyday of U.S. radio, comics often helped a laugh along by kicking the announcer or pummeling the guest star to get studio audiences laughing at what unseeing hearers could only assume was the comic's wit. But it remained for TV to forge mirth with disembodied electronic efficiency.

Sweetening the Sound Track. Much as the forgery is abused and resented, the TV comedy producer argues that it is uniquely needed by the medium, demanded by sponsors and even desired (at least unconsciously) by the viewers. Psychologists agree that people in audiences laugh aloud partly because they hear each other laughing. Therefore, for maximum enjoyment, the theory goes, the viewer alone or in small groups must get the feeling that he is in a crowd and free to join its merriment. A few sponsors have scoffed at the use of canned laughter, but the counterfeiters have had the last laugh. When Dear Phoebe jettisoned its laughter on the sponsor's orders two seasons ago, its ratings fell in the silence. Just to make sure, the advertising agency tried an experiment with the show in two cities: one station showed it with laughter and another without. The laugh-packed version ran 25% higher in its ratings.

Now the sponsor is left mainly with a choice of how to inject the laughs. Some shows, e.g., Lucy, December Bride, Phil Silvers, are filmed before a live audience whose real laughter is recorded with the show itself. Then the film's sound track is judiciously "sweetened": coughs are erased, idiot giggles toned down, chuckles reinforced and silences sprinkled with gaiety. Another common technique, used by Jack Benny, Burns & Allen, the Bob Cummings Show and Private Secretary, is to film the show without spectators, then show the film to a movie-house audience monitored by microphones. The sounds of the audience reaction are dubbed in--and again doctored on the theory that he who laughs most laughs best.

Good Listeners. "If a joke lays a complete egg," says George Burns, "we might put in two or three people to carry it along." The laugh canner's purest technique (Ozzie & Harriet) is to skip the fallible human element altogether and, as the trade has it, "lay the laugh track in cold." Says Producer Alex Gottlieb: "A good film editor can lay in a laugh track from the library that comes out sounding more authentic than live laughter. After all, people aren't expert laughers, but the sound effects man is an expert listener."

The most efficient way yet devised of laying in a laugh track is by a machine invented and operated by a former network engineer. His clients (three shows a week) and the whole industry are so furtive about canned laughter that he will discuss it only anonymously. To operate his machine, he sits at a tape console with a panel of twelve buttons, plus controls for quality and volume. Each button fades in a different shade in the whole spectrum of laughter and applause, e.g., a male belly laugh, scattered titters, the out-of-control shrieks of women, the outburst bellowing up to thunder. The engineer plays his machine like an organ, rehearses right along with the cast, tailors the laughs snugly to the lines. He does away with the fuss and bother of a studio crowd, its distracting noises and unpredictable ways of laughing in the wrong places. "I don't work from any director's script," he says with a low, contented laugh. "I play it by ear."

* Also pleureurs, who feigned tears.

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