Film Studies: Don't make me laugh... no, <i>really</i>

A few weeks ago, in California, Charles Rolland Douglass gave up this mortal struggle. (Who?) You might recall that the dead are generally remembered fondly in this column. (He didn't know my mother-in-law.) Not this time. Mr Douglass – with apologies to his family – was a rascal, a public enemy and a part of the ongoing problem. (Rustlings of anticipation.) He invented the Laff Box, the device that first allowed TV shows to augment and fabricate audience responses. (Death to all interruptions!) Now, an audience is a fine and noble organism. (Bravo!) When we speak to an audience, when we offer music or performance for them, when we tell them a joke, we are attempting to demonstrate that, yes, there can be an ultimate sharing – of the tragic and the humorous – such as testifies to the brotherhood of man. (A discordant rumbling – could this be the sound of sleep?) An audience, you see, is ourselves. (Zzzzzzzzz.)

In the old days of theatre and music hall, the management had a habit of putting one or two "plants" in an audience. (I've seen things growing in those old theatres!) These people were usually amiable specimens with an extensive range of laughter – from the incipient giggler, to the guffaw merchant; from the fat man convulsed with merry chuckles to the "Watch out, I could have a heart attack!" extremes of rolling in the aisles. But with the dawning of American television, the audience began to be just a drab piece on the board of show business success. (You tell 'em!) No matter that most studio comedy shows were done with a live audience, their amusement was not trusted as sufficient for the show's impact. (You're rolling now, DT!) Not content with placards that called for "laugh", "LAUGH" and "MORE!" (We were sheep!), the Laff Box was invented to make sure our response was at a properly "controlled" level. (Cries of "Shame!")

Mr Douglass was an engineer trained at the University of Nevada and then employed in the Navy, where he helped develop radar. After the War, he conceived of a laugh machine, using pre-recorded laughter, but with the capacity to vary it so that the mirth seemed spontaneous. With endless refinements, he and his son developed a box as big as a laptop computer that could duplicate over 40 different audience responses – the laughter taking on the tones of boredom, warmth, outrage and hysteria. They even recognised that different races and peoples laughed in different ways – the canned laughter on black comedy shows is often given the hue or whoop of alleged black laughter.

Just because it happened a long time ago is no reason to be forgiving. The arrival of commercial television was a moment when the public virtually announced to the world, "Sure, it's OK, we can be watching a movie, or the news, or a sports event, and the system can interrupt it for commercials."

I once asked a college freshman class to write out their feelings if, on a record, the space between tracks was occupied by advertisements; if, in abook, every 16 pages there was a wedge of ads; or if a movie was broken up, as it ran, with ads. They were single-mindedly hostile to such innovations. Truly, the laugh tracks, the canned response system that triggers our own, is hideous.

So why raise such matters? Because our media is going to go through violent changes soon – movies delivered direct to our homes etc – changes that are so expensive they will likely raise the matter of how much our attention is sacrosanct. Attention, you will recall, is the one thing that so many of today's teachers have trouble holding. (What did he say? I forget.)

d.thomson@independent.co.uk