Word: sound
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Just as the leaders were turning in their guns, the sound failure was fixed and KTVT hit the NBC network with an extraordinary 18 minutes in which Commentator Tom Wayman's skillful questioning drew the story out of three convicts and the governor. Mumbling like Marlon Brando understudies, the convicts described their "diffewculties." Asked if he had a weapon, one protested without a break in gum-chewing rhythm: "I didn't have no weapon. I just had a knife and one of them .22-caliber things." Why was one inmate beaten up? "He was not too popular...
...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 can borrow anything from a solitary snicker to waves of mass hilarity...
Sweetening the Sound Track. Much as the forgery is abused and resented, the TV comedy producer argues that it is uniquely needed by the medium, demanded by sponsors and even desired (at least unconsciously) by the viewers. Psychologists agree that people in audiences 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...
...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...
...laugh canner's 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...