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C A S Q U A R T E R L Y S P R I N G 2 0 2 0 73 Charlie Douglass received a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 1992 for the invention of the Laff Box and revolutionizing the laugh track. there was no audience; they would just put a laugh in later," remembered Douglass. But the process took a long time and left several bumps and bruises along the way. True to filmmaking, the first take rarely made the cut, and audiences would endure through multiple takes until the production got what they needed. As the audience grew to anticipate the joke, their laughter faded with every new take. The lack of laughter showed when it went to post, and editors scrambled to rebuild the laughter from other takes. However, Charlie Douglass—father of Bob Douglass and former sound mixer—figured there was a more efficient way to clean up and rebuild the track, and thus the Laff Box came into existence. "He was the technical director way back in the '50s, and when they do live shows and do a couple of takes, he noticed that the audience—after they heard the jokes—wouldn't laugh at it the second time," recounted Douglass. "They already knew it was coming. They'd do a take; 'Oh, we have to do that one again,' the director said. They would do it again, and the people wouldn't laugh as much because they already heard the joke. He decided we really needed a machine to fill in there because it is a lot of work to do that." "He taught America how to laugh with The Lucy Show," recalled Tommy Huth, friend of the Douglass family and fellow mixer. "He got his really big break with that. Ended up [with] Carroll Pratt, they put a laugh track to M*A*S*H and a lot of the comedy shows and the music variety shows. There was a real need for what he had discovered in those early days." Others attempted to fix the problem as well. England hired professional audiences for live filmings, but it fell flat as the laughter became a show. The audience focused so much on their job, they would come in early or laugh too big, forcing the shows in England to abandon it. But the Laff Box stood tall, overshadowing other options. Charlie became known as the "Laugh Man" in the business. If a show needed laughs, producers called him to help "sweeten" the show. His invention looked like "an old Olympia typewriter" with 32 keys—eight columns over four rows—and, inside the machine, spools of laughter. Each key triggered a different type of laughter over different lengths of time or applause and cheers. If he hit multiple keys, it extended the laughter to the desired amount. "When he pushed a button, the playback would play a certain stripe underneath it all the way around it," remembered Douglass. "He'd have punch holes around the whole loop (and) made each track into a whole loop. It would stop at a certain place. If he hit the button again, it would play the next laugh in that loop. He had four stripes on each tape—which is how he could have a variety of different types of laughter." But the machine met pushback early on in its career. "Basically, because it was the real audience laughing, it was just a box regurgitating the audience. It was fake and phony like that," recalled Douglass about how people viewed the Laff Box. "It got blown out of proportion saying it's all fake laughter and shouldn't be allowed. In the end, they said they were going to allow it because the producers were clambering for it, (saying), 'we need it to get the shows back on the air.'" The Laff Box never struggled to win favor, however. "I remember once George Slaughter, who did Laugh-In, came up with a show called The Laugh Machine," reminisced Douglass, "and he (said), 'We don't need that laugh machine because our writers and comics are so funny, we'll just have natural laughter.' The next day, he calls to see if we can sweeten the show." It became such a staple of sitcom television that the Douglass family worked hard to protect its secrets. "It was a big secret. When he'd change things in it, everybody would have to leave the room. He didn't want to expose how it worked or what it was made of," said Huth. While Charlie's invention changed the laugh track forever, live audiences brought some problems to the show. Untrained audiences brought a wide array of sound issues such as talking, coughing, or movement during a take. With microphones hanging over their heads, extraneous noises entered the picture where canned laughter came across clean every time. On top of the unruliness of audiences, speakers for the crowd to listen over created echoes and leakage from the dialogue in the laugh track. A clean take of audience laughter no longer existed—and sometimes—even leaked into the shotgun microphones over the stage. For this reason, productions never abandoned canned laughter, Charlie Douglass received a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in