Before television, audiences often experienced comedy in the presence of other audience members. Television producers attempted to recreate this atmosphere in the early days by introducing laughter or other crowd reactions into the soundtrack of TV programs. However, live audiences couldn’t be counted on to laugh at the right time. Sound engineer Charles Douglass noticed this problem and decided to remedy the situation. If a joke didn’t get the desired chuckle, Douglass inserted additional laughter. If the live audience laughed too long, Douglas gradually muted the laughter. This editing technique came to be known as “sweetening,” in which pre-recorded laughter was used to augment the response of real studio audiences if they didn’t react as desired. Douglass’s technique was used sparingly on live shows like The Jack Benny Show, and as a result went fairly unnoticed. By the end of the 1950s, live comedy transitioned from film to videotape, which allowed for editing during post-production. By the early 1960s, the recording of TV sitcoms in front of live audiences had fallen out of fashion, and Douglass was employed to simulate audience responses for entire programs. Shows like Bewitched, The Munsters and The Beverly Hillbillies are virtually showcases of Douglass’s editing work. Shows like The Andy Griffith Show, The Brady Bunch and My Three Sons had laughter that was entirely fabricated post-production. Douglas died in 2003 at the age of 93. Since then, the “laff box” — consisting of a digital device the size of a laptop that contains hundreds of human sounds — is regularly used on television shows.
