This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

For nearly five decades, the laugh track was ubiquitous on television sitcoms,

but in the early 2000s, it began to disappear. What happened? How did we get from the

rockus canned laughter of the Beverly Hillbillies to the silent sly joke every

20 seconds of 30 rock? The curious story of the laugh track starts with one man who

created the laugh track as a homemade piece of technology that took over the sound of

television and then fell out of fashion with the rise of a more modern sense of humor.

What happened to the laugh track is just one of the cultural mysteries that are being

explored on Slate's new monthly podcast, Decoder Ring. Here presenting the first episode of Decoder Ring, called The Laugh Box, is

host Willipaskin. When Paul Iverson was 8 years old, he would come home from school, turn on the TV and watch the Pink Panther show.

It was 1982 and Paul was watching the show in syndication on WGM in Chicago.

Some channels aired versions with a laugh track and some aired versions without.

I always watched the ones that had the laughter because it was, I guess as a child it was communal to me.

I said oh there's people watching with me and they sound like adults they don't sound like

children. 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.

What you've been listening to? That's mostly what the Pink Panther sounds like.

What I was doing was allowing myself to hear the laughs rather than watch the show visually like watching a show

with your eyes closed and I basically started studying us of who are these people

laughing why are they laughing the same orders they did last time?

Paul's early encounters with the Pink Panther

fostered a lifelong interest in L.Tracts.

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