Decoder Ring - The Laff Box

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4.2 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 30 April 2018

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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Welcome to Decoder Ring! Decoder Ring is a monthly podcast about cracking cultural mysteries. 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.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	When Paul Iverson was eight years old, he would come home from school, turn on the TV, and watch The Pink Panther Show.
0:11.6	It was 1982, and Paul was watching the show in syndication on WGN in Chicago.
0:17.3	Some channels aired versions with a laugh track and some aired versions without.
0:20.8	I always watch the ones that had the laughter because it was, I guess, as a child, it was communal to me.
0:26.3	I said, oh, there's people watching with me, and they sound like adults. They don't sound like children.
0:36.2	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.
0:45.8	What you've been listening to? That's mostly what the Pink Panther sounds like.
0:49.3	What I was doing was allowing myself to hear the laughs rather than watch the show visually, like watching
0:56.1	a show at your eyes closed. And I basically started studying. I said, who are these people laughing?
1:01.6	Why are they laughing in the same order as they did last time? Paul's early encounters with the Pink Panther
1:06.2	fostered a lifelong interest in laugh tracks. Paul lives in L.A. and works as an account manager at an
1:11.9	insurance company, but he's a passionate laugh track hobbyist. Paul taught himself everything about
1:16.9	laugh tracks, how they're made, who made them, the difference between them, even how to make them
1:21.1	for himself. The monkeys is a great show to think of because they killed the laugh track halfway
1:25.2	through the second season. One of my goals in
1:27.7	life is to re-add the laugh track and not just add it, but try to add it as it was during that
1:32.8	season using those same laughs. It's really a very strange obsession because there's so few people
1:38.3	you can tell it to, but I love recreating them. I love isolating these clips and putting them on anything I possibly can.
1:45.8	One of the shows that Paul tinkered around with is the ABC sitcom Modern Family. It doesn't have a
1:50.6	laugh track, so Paul gave it one. I've just never read a teacher not like me before.
1:54.9	Well, Miss Davis. Please, she's a gym teacher. She has to teaching what Dr. Seuss is to medicine.
2:00.2	But to think she didn't like you.
	...

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