The Laff Box

Decoder Ring

Slate Podcasts

Documentary, History, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 30 April 2018

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn. Sign up now to listen and support our work. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode is brought to you by Pepsi Max. Christmas is great, but there's loads of ways to make it better.
0:08.0	Like sneaking some chili into the gravy for some extra oint, or building a playlist that will even get your
0:14.8	none up on the table or just cracking open an ice cold Pepsi Max.
0:20.1	Christmas.
0:23.0	Better with Pepsi Max.
0:27.0	When Paul Iverson was 8 years old, he would come home from school, turn on the TV, and watch the Pink Panther show.
0:37.0	It was 1982 and Paul was watching the show in syndication on WGM in Chicago.
0:44.0	Some channels aired versions with a laugh track and some aired versions without.
0:48.0	I always watched the ones that had the laughter because it was, I guess as a child it was communal to me.
0:53.0	I said, oh, there's people watching with me and they sound like adults, they don't sound like children.
0:57.0	He loved the show so much that he would tape it, but he didn't have a VCR, so he would use a tape
1:07.9	recorder, one that only captured the sound even though the Pink Panther show has very little dialogue. What you've been listening to? That's mostly what the Pink Panther show has very little dialogue.
1:12.8	What you've been listening to?
1:14.1	That's mostly what the Pink Panther sounds like.
1:16.3	What I was doing was allowing myself to hear the laughs rather than watch the show
1:21.5	visually,
1:22.8	like watching a show with your eyes closed.
1:24.4	And I basically started studying it.
1:26.4	So who are these people laughing?
1:28.8	Why are they laughing the same orders they did last time?
1:31.3	Paul's early encounters with the Pink Panther
1:33.4	fostered a lifelong interest in Laugh Tracks. Paul lives in LA and works as an
	...

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