Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: I'm Lauren Voge Obam, and I've got another classic episode
Speaker 1: of brain stuff for you today from our erstwhile host,
Speaker 1: Christian Saga. This one is about laugh tracks in sitcoms.
Speaker 1: Why are they there? How did they get their start?
Speaker 1: And do they really make us more likely to laugh? Hey? Everybody,
Speaker 1: I'm Christian Saga and this is brain Stuff. Do you
Speaker 1: remember how sitcoms used to lay in those horrible laugh
Speaker 1: tracks after every joke, including cartoons, like just in case
Speaker 1: the jokes weren't insulting your intelligence, they had to go
Speaker 1: to you with taped laughter, like they're running the faucet
Speaker 1: to get somebody with a shy bladder to pee. I
Speaker 1: can't believe this, but some shows are still doing it.
Speaker 1: Why Well, back before recordings and radio and TV, all
Speaker 1: performances were live. This meant actors always had the benefit
Speaker 1: of a crowd's reacts to drive their performance, and the
Speaker 1: audience reaped the benefits of that energy to pension during
Speaker 1: a sad moment, a collective gasp at a revelation, or
Speaker 1: mass laughter when something funny happened. Broadcasts and recordings, however,
Speaker 1: brought these performances to a wider audience, but some of
Speaker 1: that energy got lost in the transition. Every show couldn't
Speaker 1: involve a crowd, and you couldn't always rely on an
Speaker 1: audience to have the right reaction. They might be too
Speaker 1: loud or too quiet, or they might not laugh at
Speaker 1: all after say the fifth take of a joke. So
Speaker 1: in the late forties and early fifties, radio and TV
Speaker 1: engineers began sweetening audience reactions, mixing them to sound more appropriate.
Speaker 1: This became a huge trend in the industry. When Charlie
Speaker 1: Douglas invented the original laugh box. It looked sort of
Speaker 1: like a typewriter, but contained three hundred and twenty laughs
Speaker 1: and other audience noises. The noises were grouped by type
Speaker 1: of response into already two loops of tape, each activated
Speaker 1: by a single key. You played it like an organ.
Speaker 1: You'd select the style, age, and gender of the response
Speaker 1: you wanted by pressing one or more keys. Then you'd
Speaker 1: use a foot pedal to control the sound level. Supposedly,
Speaker 1: Douglas recorded these original noises at Marcel Marceau and Red
Speaker 1: Skeleton shows, totally pantomime parts to make sure he'd get
Speaker 1: a clean tape of just the audience. These days, laugh
Speaker 1: tracks are digital and they contain lots of sounds, though
Speaker 1: if you watch any particular sitcom, you've probably heard distinctive
Speaker 1: laughs repeat, which brings me to my next point. Industry
Speaker 1: critics and creators alike hate laugh tracks. Pretty much everybody
Speaker 1: who stops to think about them hates them. But do
Speaker 1: they work? You bet they do. Have you ever seen
Speaker 1: one of those YouTube videos where they take a popular
Speaker 1: sitcom and remove the laugh track. It turns into this
Speaker 1: creepy nightmare world where people say to pressing things to
Speaker 1: each other and then pause for three seconds. Without the
Speaker 1: laugh track, you realize the jokes aren't necessarily funny, you're
Speaker 1: just laughing along with some invisible crowd. One theory says
Speaker 1: that we feel social pressure to conform to the group.
Speaker 1: Another suggest 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 just reacting to the
Speaker 1: laughter itself. But provines results wore off after repeated tests.
Speaker 1: By the tenth round, subjects stopped laughing along and reported
Speaker 1: that they found the taped laughter obnoxious. So okay, laugh
Speaker 1: tracks do seem to influence the audience, but there are
Speaker 1: tons of factors that moderate this. For example, what if
Speaker 1: you're consciously aware that the laughters canned? Study in ninet
Speaker 1: found that people who thought the sound was coming from
Speaker 1: a live audience were more influenced by it than people
Speaker 1: who were aware that it was artificial. Or what if
Speaker 1: you don't think you'd get along with the people who
Speaker 1: were laughing? In two thousand five, a paper published by
Speaker 1: the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that college students
Speaker 1: laughed less and rated a taped comedian lower when they
Speaker 1: thought that the tape laughter they heard was coming from
Speaker 1: members of a political party they disagreed with. But laughing
Speaker 1: in response to hearing laughter may be involuntary. In two
Speaker 1: thousand six, research yours at the University College London used
Speaker 1: f m R I to discover that human vocal sounds
Speaker 1: activated 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. Today's
Speaker 1: episode was produced by Tyler Clang and written by Joe
Speaker 1: McCormick and I for Brainstuff's YouTube series. If you enjoy
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