Am I the last to know?

[Moraldo Rubini]

I just read a year-old article from Phoenix' newspaper that discussed the history of the television laugh track. [I wonder if radio ever used them?] Supposedly it goes back to 1953, when a sound engineer named Charlie Douglass invented the "Laff Box", a contraption that could mix all different kinds of laughter -- giggles, guffaws, male, female, children -- into a single track, so it sounded real.

This tidbit is what captured the trivia-lover in me: Supposedly a lot of laughs came from the Red Skelton Show in the early 1950's. Skelton's pantomime skits allowed Douglass to tape laughter and applause without any dialogue getting in the way. These laughs are still used today!

Additional thought: did the woman who said "uh oh" and then nervously laughed on I Love Lucy have any idea that her voice would be recognized for generations?

[jdb1]

I just read a year-old article from Phoenix' newspaper that discussed the history of the television laugh track. [I wonder if radio ever used them?] Supposedly it goes back to 1953, when a sound engineer named Charlie Douglass invented the "Laff Box", a contraption that could mix all different kinds of laughter -- giggles, guffaws, male, female, children -- into a single track, so it sounded real.

This tidbit is what captured the trivia-lover in me: Supposedly a lot of laughs came from the Red Skelton Show in the early 1950's. Skelton's pantomime skits allowed Douglass to tape laughter and applause without any dialogue getting in the way. These laughs are still used today!

Additional thought: did the woman who said "uh oh" and then nervously laughed on I Love Lucy have any idea that her voice would be recognized for generations?

Oh, Marco - that "uh oh" on Lucy! I swear sometimes, when the TV is off and the apartment is very quiet, I can still hear her, far off somewhere in the primordial ether. The rumor, when I was a kid, was that it was real-life Lucy's real-life mother, Desiree, who was recorded saying "uh oh." I wonder.