WEBVTT - How Do Laugh Tracks Work? 0:00:00.080 --> 0:00:04.560 How do refrigerators keep food cold? Who really invented the radio? 0:00:04.680 --> 0:00:08.000 What was the worst video game of all time? On 0:00:08.119 --> 0:00:11.520 tech Stuff, we answer these questions and more. You can 0:00:11.560 --> 0:00:15.120 get brand new episodes of tech Stuff every Wednesday on Spotify, 0:00:15.400 --> 0:00:23.200 Google Play, iTunes, and anywhere else you get podcasts. Welcome 0:00:23.239 --> 0:00:30.320 to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey everybody, I'm 0:00:30.400 --> 0:00:34.040 Christian Seger and this is brain Stuff. Do you remember 0:00:34.040 --> 0:00:37.040 how sitcoms used to lay in those horrible laugh tracks 0:00:37.080 --> 0:00:40.879 after every joke, including cartoons, like just in case the 0:00:40.960 --> 0:00:43.880 jokes weren't insulting your intelligence, they had to go to 0:00:43.920 --> 0:00:46.680 you with taped laughter, like they're running the faucet to 0:00:46.680 --> 0:00:49.760 get somebody with a shy bladder to pee. I can't 0:00:49.800 --> 0:00:54.080 believe this, but some shows are still doing it. Why Well, 0:00:54.440 --> 0:00:58.720 back before recordings and radio and TV, all performances were live. 0:00:59.120 --> 0:01:01.240 This meant actor has always had the benefit of a 0:01:01.320 --> 0:01:05.039 crowd's reactions to drive their performance, and the audience reaped 0:01:05.040 --> 0:01:09.400 the benefits of that energy to pension during a sad moment, 0:01:09.680 --> 0:01:13.400 a collective gasp at a revelation, or mass laughter when 0:01:13.520 --> 0:01:18.280 something funny happened. Broadcasts and recordings, however, brought these performances 0:01:18.280 --> 0:01:21.559 to a wider audience, but some of that energy got 0:01:21.560 --> 0:01:25.200 lost in the transition. Every show couldn't involve a crowd, 0:01:25.600 --> 0:01:27.880 and you couldn't always rely on an audience to have 0:01:27.959 --> 0:01:31.120 the right reaction. They might be too loud or too quiet, 0:01:31.200 --> 0:01:33.959 or they might not laugh at all after say the 0:01:34.040 --> 0:01:37.120 fifth take of a joke. So in the late forties 0:01:37.160 --> 0:01:43.320 and early fifties, radio and TV engineers began sweetening audience reactions, 0:01:43.680 --> 0:01:47.200 mixing them to sound more appropriate. This became a huge 0:01:47.319 --> 0:01:50.960 trend in the industry when Charlie Douglas invented the original 0:01:51.480 --> 0:01:54.440 laugh box. It looked sort of like a typewriter, but 0:01:54.520 --> 0:01:58.680 contained three hundred and twenty laughs and other audience noises. 0:01:59.240 --> 0:02:02.440 The noises are grouped by type of response into thirty 0:02:02.480 --> 0:02:06.640 two loops of tape, each activated by a single key. 0:02:06.840 --> 0:02:09.919 You played it like an organ. You'd select the style, age, 0:02:09.919 --> 0:02:12.280 and gender of the response you wanted by pressing one 0:02:12.360 --> 0:02:15.079 or more keys. Then you'd use a foot pedal to 0:02:15.120 --> 0:02:20.000 control the sound level. Supposedly, Douglas recorded these original noises 0:02:20.040 --> 0:02:25.080 at Marcel Marceau and Red Skeleton shows, totally pantomime parts 0:02:25.400 --> 0:02:28.040 to make sure he'd get a clean tape of just 0:02:28.400 --> 0:02:32.639 the audience. These days, laugh tracks are digital and they 0:02:32.680 --> 0:02:36.720 contain lots of sounds, though if you watch any particular sitcom, 0:02:36.880 --> 0:02:40.640 you've probably heard distinctive laughs repeat, which brings me to 0:02:40.680 --> 0:02:46.840 my next point. Industry critics and creators alike hate laugh tracks. 0:02:47.200 --> 0:02:50.119 Pretty much everybody who stops to think about them hates them. 0:02:50.280 --> 0:02:53.280 But do they work? You bet they do. Have you 0:02:53.320 --> 0:02:55.520 ever seen one of those YouTube videos where they take 0:02:55.560 --> 0:02:59.080 a popular sitcom and remove the laugh track. It turns 0:02:59.120 --> 0:03:02.920 into this creep nightmare world where people say depressing things 0:03:02.919 --> 0:03:07.800 to each other and then pause for three seconds. Without 0:03:07.840 --> 0:03:11.280 the laugh track, you realize the jokes aren't necessarily funny, 0:03:11.320 --> 0:03:14.760 you're just laughing along with some invisible crowd. One theory 0:03:14.800 --> 0:03:18.400 says that we feel social pressure to conform to the group. 0:03:18.680 --> 0:03:23.720 Another suggests laughter is an automatic neurological response, something a 0:03:23.760 --> 0:03:28.760 little more hardwired. Either way, real research going back decades 0:03:28.800 --> 0:03:32.520 shows that laugh tracks work. In nineteen seventy four, a 0:03:32.560 --> 0:03:36.480 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showed 0:03:36.560 --> 0:03:39.960 empirically that people were more likely to laugh at jokes 0:03:40.280 --> 0:03:43.920 that were supplemented with a laugh track. In fact, with 0:03:44.080 --> 0:03:46.760 a laugh track, you might not even need the joke. 0:03:47.160 --> 0:03:53.480 In neuroscientist Robert Provine showed that test subjects smiled and 0:03:53.600 --> 0:03:57.720 laughed in response to an electronic track that wasn't even 0:03:57.760 --> 0:04:01.960 attached to a narrative. They were reacting to the laughter itself. 0:04:02.440 --> 0:04:06.640 But provines results wore off after repeated tests. By the 0:04:06.680 --> 0:04:10.520 tenth round, subjects stopped laughing along and reported that they 0:04:10.560 --> 0:04:15.640 found the taped laughter obnoxious. So okay, laugh tracks do 0:04:15.760 --> 0:04:19.120 seem to influence the audience, but there are tons of 0:04:19.160 --> 0:04:22.520 factors that moderate this. For example, what if you're consciously 0:04:22.640 --> 0:04:27.440 aware that the laughters canned? Study in found that people 0:04:27.480 --> 0:04:29.960 who thought the sound was coming from a live audience 0:04:30.240 --> 0:04:33.320 were more influenced by it than people who were aware 0:04:33.480 --> 0:04:37.280 that it was artificial. Or what if you don't think 0:04:37.360 --> 0:04:39.800 you'd get along with the people who are laughing? In 0:04:39.839 --> 0:04:42.599 two thousand five, a paper published by the Journal of 0:04:42.640 --> 0:04:47.240 Experimental Social Psychology found that college students laughed less and 0:04:47.360 --> 0:04:50.240 rated a taped comedian lower when they thought that the 0:04:50.320 --> 0:04:53.320 tape laughter they heard was coming from members of a 0:04:53.360 --> 0:04:57.680 political party they disagreed with. But laughing in response to 0:04:57.720 --> 0:05:01.279 hearing laughter may be in volunte terry. In two thousand 0:05:01.279 --> 0:05:05.000 and six researchers at the University College London used f 0:05:05.400 --> 0:05:09.160 m R I to discover that human vocal sounds activated 0:05:09.240 --> 0:05:13.400 part of the brain called the pre motor cortical region, 0:05:13.760 --> 0:05:17.440 which primes our facial muscles to react. That means that 0:05:17.480 --> 0:05:22.040 when subjects heard laughing, they began to smile. Some theorists 0:05:22.080 --> 0:05:26.880 think that gestures and sounds like laughter predated speech. Could 0:05:26.960 --> 0:05:36.280 our vulnerability to laughter actually be a survival mechanism. Check 0:05:36.279 --> 0:05:38.360 out the brain stuff channel on YouTube, and for more 0:05:38.400 --> 0:05:40.919 on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff 0:05:40.920 --> 0:05:55.400 works dot com.