How Filthy Jokes Led to the Creation of the Laugh Track
Those of us who grew up with TV sitcoms are well acquainted with the laugh track, that unseen chorus of chucklers that lets everybody know when something is supposed to be funny. If not for the laugh track, Friends would have been a depressing, awkward pause-filled drama.
Obviously a lot of famous sitcoms have been filmed in front of live studio audiences, but networks also “sweeten” audience laughter with pre-recorded tracks, or just add laughs to scenes where no audience was present — hence why the disembodied sounds of cracking up were still present when the Full House gang took a corporate-mandated trip to Disney World.
The advent of “canned laughter” is mostly thanks to technology created by TV sound engineer Charles Douglass. But even before that, the origins of the laugh track can be traced back to a comedian practically nobody remembers today: Bob “Bazooka” Burns.
Before he inadvertently inspired the bogus laughter industry, Burns had already influenced the military, also completely by accident. His act involved playing a “novelty musical instrument made from a stovepipe and a whisky funnel,” which he dubbed the “bazooka.” When the U.S. developed a rocket launcher that could take out German tanks during World War II, someone remarked that the new weapon looked “like Bob Burns’ bazooka,” and the name stuck.
Burns’ shtick mostly consisted of telling tall tales about his fictional Arkansas family, including characters like Grandpa Snazzy, Uncle Fudd and Aunt Peachy Sims, making him “Hollywood’s most famous hayseed.” He went on to land his own radio show, and star in a number of movies. Incidentally, the residents of his hometown of Van Buren weren’t exactly thrilled that he made a fortune by portraying them as “barefooted and ignorant.”
As recounted in AY Magazine, during an appearance on a Bing Crosby-hosted radio show in 1946, Burns got huge laughs from the audience when he went off-script and told dirty jokes at the expense of his fellow Arkansans.
But the jokes never made it to the airwaves. Crosby, who reportedly hated live performances, was an early adopter of audio tape and hired two pioneers in the field for his show: John Mullin and William Palmer. So, due to the “offensive nature of the jokes,” Burns’ racy lines were cut out of the pre-recorded show prior to the broadcast.
Even though the lewd material couldn’t be used, Palmer saw “potential” in the audio of the audience’s reaction. “We couldn’t use the jokes, but Bill (Palmer) asked us to save the laughs,” Mullin later recalled.
A few weeks later, when another comedian came on the show and bombed, they were able to edit in the laughter from Burns’ set, creating what many regard as the first example of canned laughter. Although, even at the time, listeners were suspicious when they heard huge laughs following lame gags. “It brought letters, because those big guffaws sounded ridiculous after the corny jokes,” Mullin admitted. Just think how they would react to The Big Bang Theory.
According to The New York Times, this became standard practice for the show at Crosby’s “behest,” with Mullin and Palmer adding “applause and laughter to tapes of live performances that didn’t inspire enough audience reaction or that weren’t really live at all.”
While canned laughter is pretty bad, it should be said that popularizing the laugh track is far from the worst thing Bing Crosby ever did. Just ask his kids.
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