The Engineer Who Canned Laughter for Forty Years

Charles Rolland Douglass came home from the Navy in 1945 with a working knowledge of radar electronics and an idea about audience reaction. By 1953, working at his kitchen table in Los Angeles, he had built a three-foot cabinet out of household appliances, organ parts, and vacuum tubes. He called it the Audience Response Duplicator. Television sound engineers called it the Laff Box.

The device held 32 tape reels, ten laughs per reel — at its peak, 320 distinct chuckles, titters, guffaws, and rolling waves of approval, sortable by intensity, gender, and ethnic flavor of the imagined crowd. Douglass played them like an organ, with a foot pedal for sustain. He was the only person who knew the patterns; he kept the box locked and brought it to the studio personally.

Most of the laughs came from a single source: the silent pantomime segments on The Red Skelton Show, where the audience laughed at physical comedy with no dialogue underneath. Douglass extracted those laughs cleanly, decade after decade, and slotted them into shows that wanted a livelier crowd than the one they'd actually filmed. He called the technique "sweetening."

His reels ran on The Munsters, Bewitched, The Beverly Hillbillies, Gilligan's Island, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Cheers — tens of thousands of episodes through the 1970s and into the 1980s. If you have ever heard a sitcom audience laugh, there is a good chance you were hearing a Skelton crowd from sometime in the 1950s, replayed at the right moment by a Mexican-born sound engineer who never patented the trick because he didn't want anyone else to have one.

The people he was making laugh in 1955 are mostly gone. Their laughter is still on television.