The Laff Box (Encore)
Decoder Ring
Slate Podcasts
4.6 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 4 June 2025
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Decoder Ring is marking its 100th episode this year. To celebrate, we’re revisiting our very first episode from 2018, which asks: What happened to the laugh track? For nearly five decades, the laugh track was ubiquitous, but beginning in the early 2000s, it fell out of sitcom fashion. What happened? How did we get from The Beverly Hillbillies to 30 Rock? In this episode 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, this episode asks if the laugh track was about something bigger than laughter.
You can read more in Willa’s article “The Man Who Perfected the Laugh Track” in Slate.
Links and further reading on some of the things we discussed on the show:
Interview with Ben Glenn II on the history of the laugh track in McSweeney’s
See a Charlie Douglas Laff Box on Antiques Roadshow
More of Paul Iverson’s work restoring laugh tracks and inserting them into new shows
Friends without a Laugh Track by Sboss
This episode was written by Willa Paskin. It was produced and edited by Benjamin Frisch, who also created the episode art. Decoder Ring is produced by Katie Shepherd, Max Freedman, and our supervising producer Evan Chung.
If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at DecoderRing@slate.com, or leave a message on the Decoder RIng hotline at 347-460-7281. We love to hear any and all of your ideas for the show.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Willa. |
| 0:02.0 | Today we're re-airing an episode, and it is not just any episode. |
| 0:06.4 | It is our very first ever episode. |
| 0:10.9 | See, sometime over this summer, depending on exactly how you count, |
| 0:15.1 | we're going to be airing our 100th episode. |
| 0:18.8 | And so we wanted to go all the way back to the beginning. In the beginning |
| 0:23.1 | was a close look at the laugh track. A laugh track is the pre-recorded laughter that used to be |
| 0:29.5 | a part of every TV sitcom, but is not anymore. And we wanted to figure out why it went out of style. |
| 0:36.6 | As you're going to hear, the bones of the show were there from the very beginning. |
| 0:41.0 | The ideas, the characters, the research, the curiosity, the object hiding in plain sight. |
| 0:46.4 | We've also come a long way. |
| 0:48.4 | Maybe especially, I would say, in my vocal delivery. |
| 0:52.6 | Prior to the very first episode of Decoder Ring, |
| 0:54.7 | I'd never recorded anything on a microphone before, |
| 0:58.3 | and needless to say, you can tell. |
| 1:01.2 | Another thing about this episode is it's the reason we have our retro-sounding theme song. |
| 1:06.4 | It actually was supposed to sound a little bit like an old-school sitcom theme song, |
| 1:10.4 | which totally |
| 1:11.4 | makes sense for an episode about the laugh track. But then we just kept it for all the other |
| 1:18.0 | episodes we've done, none of which have been about the laugh track. Though I think in its way, |
| 1:23.1 | it works. I'm not going to lie to you, A hundred episodes does feel a little bit like an accomplishment. |
| 1:30.2 | Thank you so much for making it possible for listening. We hope you enjoy this one. When Paul Iverson was eight years old, he would come home from school, turn on the TV, and watch the Pink Panther show. |
... |
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