Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When the cameras stopped grinding recently on an installment of I Love Lucy, Co-Star Desi Arnaz turned to thank the studio audience for its laughter during the filming of the show. Slipping up from behind, Lucille Ball crowned her husband with a pizza and the audience exploded. "That was the best laugh of the evening," chirped one spectator. "It should have been on the show." Chances are that it was-or will be. The laugh was captured on tape for Desilu Productions' library of canned laughter, from which the sound tracks of the company's shows...
...Canned laughter rings, too often like hollow mockery, through virtually every filmed comedy show on TV. It is a hoary part of show business, at least as old as Nero who, in his ventures as an actor, packed his houses with as many as 5,000 soldiers under strict orders to appreciate him. The French refined it with the institution of the claque, with such specialists as rieurs* or laughers. In the heyday of U.S. radio, comics often helped a laugh along by kicking the announcer or pummeling the guest star to get studio audiences laughing at what unseeing hearers...
...laugh aloud partly because they hear each other laughing. Therefore, for maximum enjoyment, the theory goes, the viewer alone or in small groups must get the feeling that he is in a crowd and free to join its merriment. A few sponsors have scoffed at the use of canned laughter, but the counterfeiters have had the last laugh. When Dear Phoebe jettisoned its laughter on the sponsor's orders two seasons ago, its ratings fell in the silence. Just to make sure, the advertising agency tried an experiment with the show in two cities: one station showed it with...
...sponsor is left mainly with a choice of how to inject the laughs. Some shows, e.g., Lucy, December Bride, Phil Silvers, are filmed before a live audience whose real laughter is recorded with the show itself. Then the film's sound track is judiciously "sweetened": coughs are erased, idiot giggles toned down, chuckles reinforced and silences sprinkled with gaiety. Another common technique, used by Jack Benny, Burns & Allen, the Bob Cummings Show and Private Secretary, is to film the show without spectators, then show the film to a movie-house audience monitored by microphones. The sounds of the audience...
...purest technique (Ozzie & Harriet) is to skip the fallible human element altogether and, as the trade has it, "lay the laugh track in cold." Says Producer Alex Gottlieb: "A good film editor can lay in a laugh track from the library that comes out sounding more authentic than live laughter. After all, people aren't expert laughers, but the sound effects man is an expert listener...