Speaker 1: How do refrigerators keep food cold? Who really invented the radio?
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Speaker 1: tech Stuff, we answer these questions and more. You can
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Speaker 1: to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey everybody, I'm
Speaker 1: Christian Seger and this is brain Stuff. Do you remember
Speaker 1: how sitcoms used to lay in those horrible laugh tracks
Speaker 1: after every joke, including cartoons, like just in case the
Speaker 1: jokes weren't insulting your intelligence, they had to go to
Speaker 1: you with taped laughter, like they're running the faucet to
Speaker 1: get somebody with a shy bladder to pee. I can't
Speaker 1: believe this, but some shows are still doing it. Why Well,
Speaker 1: back before recordings and radio and TV, all performances were live.
Speaker 1: This meant actor has always had the benefit of a
Speaker 1: crowd's reactions to drive their performance, and the audience reaped
Speaker 1: the benefits of that energy to pension during a sad moment,
Speaker 1: a collective gasp at a revelation, or mass laughter when
Speaker 1: something funny happened. Broadcasts and recordings, however, brought these performances
Speaker 1: to a wider audience, but some of that energy got
Speaker 1: lost in the transition. Every show couldn't involve a crowd,
Speaker 1: and you couldn't always rely on an audience to have
Speaker 1: the right reaction. They might be too loud or too quiet,
Speaker 1: or they might not laugh at all after say the
Speaker 1: fifth take of a joke. So in the late forties
Speaker 1: and early fifties, radio and TV engineers began sweetening audience reactions,
Speaker 1: mixing them to sound more appropriate. This became a huge
Speaker 1: trend in the industry when Charlie Douglas invented the original
Speaker 1: laugh box. It looked sort of like a typewriter, but
Speaker 1: contained three hundred and twenty laughs and other audience noises.
Speaker 1: The noises are grouped by type of response into thirty
Speaker 1: two loops of tape, each activated by a single key.
Speaker 1: You played it like an organ. You'd select the style, age,
Speaker 1: and gender of the response you wanted by pressing one
Speaker 1: or more keys. Then you'd use a foot pedal to
Speaker 1: control the sound level. Supposedly, Douglas recorded these original noises
Speaker 1: at Marcel Marceau and Red Skeleton shows, totally pantomime parts
Speaker 1: to make sure he'd get a clean tape of just
Speaker 1: the audience. These days, laugh tracks are digital and they
Speaker 1: contain lots of sounds, though if you watch any particular sitcom,
Speaker 1: you've probably heard distinctive laughs repeat, which brings me to
Speaker 1: my next point. Industry critics and creators alike hate laugh tracks.
Speaker 1: Pretty much everybody who stops to think about them hates them.
Speaker 1: But do they work? You bet they do. Have you
Speaker 1: ever seen one of those YouTube videos where they take
Speaker 1: a popular sitcom and remove the laugh track. It turns
Speaker 1: into this creep nightmare world where people say depressing things
Speaker 1: to each other and then pause for three seconds. Without
Speaker 1: the laugh track, you realize the jokes aren't necessarily funny,
Speaker 1: you're just laughing along with some invisible crowd. One theory
Speaker 1: says that we feel social pressure to conform to the group.
Speaker 1: Another suggests laughter is an automatic neurological response, something a
Speaker 1: little more hardwired. Either way, real research going back decades
Speaker 1: shows that laugh tracks work. In nineteen seventy four, a
Speaker 1: study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showed
Speaker 1: empirically that people were more likely to laugh at jokes
Speaker 1: that were supplemented with a laugh track. In fact, with
Speaker 1: a laugh track, you might not even need the joke.
Speaker 1: In neuroscientist Robert Provine showed that test subjects smiled and
Speaker 1: laughed in response to an electronic track that wasn't even
Speaker 1: attached to a narrative. They were reacting to the laughter itself.
Speaker 1: But provines results wore off after repeated tests. By the
Speaker 1: tenth round, subjects stopped laughing along and reported that they
Speaker 1: found the taped laughter obnoxious. So okay, laugh tracks do
Speaker 1: seem to influence the audience, but there are tons of
Speaker 1: factors that moderate this. For example, what if you're consciously
Speaker 1: aware that the laughters canned? Study in found that people
Speaker 1: who thought the sound was coming from a live audience
Speaker 1: were more influenced by it than people who were aware
Speaker 1: that it was artificial. Or what if you don't think
Speaker 1: you'd get along with the people who are laughing? In
Speaker 1: two thousand five, a paper published by the Journal of
Speaker 1: Experimental Social Psychology found that college students laughed less and
Speaker 1: rated a taped comedian lower when they thought that the
Speaker 1: tape laughter they heard was coming from members of a
Speaker 1: political party they disagreed with. But laughing in response to
Speaker 1: hearing laughter may be in volunte terry. In two thousand
Speaker 1: and six researchers at the University College London used f
Speaker 1: m R I to discover that human vocal sounds activated
Speaker 1: part of the brain called the pre motor cortical region,
Speaker 1: which primes our facial muscles to react. That means that
Speaker 1: when subjects heard laughing, they began to smile. Some theorists
Speaker 1: think that gestures and sounds like laughter predated speech. Could
Speaker 1: our vulnerability to laughter actually be a survival mechanism. Check
Speaker 1: out the brain stuff channel on YouTube, and for more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com.