Culture Gabfest Presents Decoder Ring: The Laff Box

Slate Culture

Slate Podcasts

Arts, Tv & Film, Music

4.4 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 4 May 2018

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Julia Turner is here to introduce you to the new show from Slate's TV Critic Willa Paskin. Decoder Ring: the show about cracking cultural mysteries. Subscribe here to get episodes as soon as they're ready. Every episode we’ll take on a cultural object, idea, or habit and speak with experts, historians and obsessives to try to figure out where it comes from, what it means and why it matters. Why do we get so invested in fictional romances? What does it mean to wear a baseball hat backwards? Why do we clap? What do people think about all day? Decoder Ring explores questions and topics you didn't know you were curious about. In our first episode, we ask: What happened to the laugh track? For nearly five decades, it was ubiquitous, but beginning in the early 2000s, it fell out of sitcom fashion. What happened? How did we get from Beverly Hillbillies to 30 Rock? We meet the man who created the laugh track, which originated as a homemade piece of technology, and trace that technology’s fall and the rise of a more modern idea about humor. With the help of historians, laugh track obsessives, the showrunners of One Day at a Time and the director of Sports Night, we wonder if the laugh track was about something bigger than laughter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello Culture Gabfest listeners. We have an extremely special treat for you in this
0:06.2	feed, the brand new debut episode of Willa Paskin's brand new podcast, produced by a name that will be familiar to is called Decoderring.
0:15.0	Pottweg, The wonderful Benjamin Frisch.
0:17.0	The show is called Decoder Ring, and it cracks cultural mysteries.
0:21.0	In episode one, you will hear about the history of the laugh track which we
0:24.6	used to love and enjoy and now think is grotesque and stupid how'd that happen among
0:29.2	the things I learned from this episode the laugh track was like an object. There was like a
0:34.2	literal crazy object that made laugh tracks and you will learn what it is if you
0:39.0	listen to this wonderful episode. So two steps for you, dear podcast listeners. Number one, go right now to
0:45.2	your podcast app, Apple Podcast, whatever it is, wherever you listen, and subscribe to
0:49.6	the Decoder Ring feed. Do this for two reasons. First, it will ensure that you get Dakota Ring episodes in the future as soon as they're cooked and ready.
0:58.0	And once you hear this one, you will want that. Second, it will help more people discover the show if lots of people
1:05.4	subscribe right now as we're launching. So go subscribe and then continue listening and enjoy.
1:13.0	When Paul Iverson was eight years old, he would come home from school,
1:21.0	turn on the TV and watch the Pink Panther show.
1:25.4	It was 1982 and Paul was watching the show in syndication on WGM in Chicago.
1:30.8	Some channels aired versions with a laugh track and some aired versions without.
1:34.0	I always watched the ones that had the laughter because it was, I guess as a child it was
1:38.7	communal to me. I said, oh, there's people watching with me and they sound like adults. They don't sound like children.
1:43.6	He loved the show so much that he would tape it, but he didn't have a VCR, so he would use a tape recorder, one that only captured the sound, even though the Pink Panther show has very little dialogue.
1:59.0	What you've been listening to, that's mostly what the Pink Panther sounds like.
2:03.0	What I was doing was allowing myself to hear the laughs rather than watch the show visually,
	...

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