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SPEAKER_12: When Paul Iverson was eight years old, he would come home from school, turn on the TV, and watch The Pink Panther Show. It was 1982 and Paul was watching the show in syndication on WGN in Chicago. Some channels aired versions with a laugh track and some aired versions without. I always watched the ones that had the laughter because it was, I guess as a child, it was communal to me.
SPEAKER_16: I said, oh, there's people watching with me and they sound like adults, they don't sound like children.
SPEAKER_12: He loved the show so much that he would tape it, but he didn't have a VCR. So he would use a tape recorder, one that only captured the sound, even though The Pink Panther Show has very little dialogue. What you've been listening to, that's mostly what The Pink Panther sounds like. What I was doing was allowing myself to hear the laughs rather than watch the show visually, like watching a show with your eyes closed.
SPEAKER_16: And I basically started studying this, who are these people laughing? Why are they laughing in the same order as they did last time? Paul's early encounters with The Pink Panther fostered a lifelong interest in laugh tracks.
SPEAKER_12: Paul lives in LA and works as an account manager at an insurance company, but he's a passionate laugh track hobbyist. Paul taught himself everything about laugh tracks, how they're made, who made them, the difference between them, even how to make them for himself. The Monkees is a great show to think of because they killed the laugh track halfway through the second season.
SPEAKER_16: One of my goals in life is to re-add the laugh track and not just add it, but try to add it as it was during that season using those same laughs. It's really a very strange obsession because there's so few people you can tell it to, but I love recreating them. I love isolating these clips and putting them on anything I possibly can.
SPEAKER_12: One of the shows that Paul tinkered around with is the ABC sitcom Modern Family. It doesn't have a laugh track, so Paul gave it one. I've just never had a teacher not like me before.
SPEAKER_07: Well, I'm Miss Davis. Please, she's a gym teacher. She's to teaching what Dr. Seuss is to medicine.
SPEAKER_00: But to think she didn't like you.
SPEAKER_12: Modern Family premiered in 2009, but if it had arrived just five years earlier, it would have sounded something like that. From the 1950s to the early 2000s, sitcoms had laugh tracks, period. And then, when laugh track free shows like Arrested Development and the American version of The Office made it to network TV, they mostly disappeared. Most sitcoms today don't have one, except for a few big hits like The Big Bang Theory and reboots like Roseanne. When we talk about laugh tracks now, it's mostly to make jokes about them. But when Paul was growing up and every show had a laugh track, people didn't talk about them very much. They were kind of a secret. So few people knew about it or discussed it. Everybody hears it. Everybody is aware of it. Why won't anybody talk about it?
SPEAKER_16: Today, we're going to talk about it.
SPEAKER_12: Growing up, I never thought much about the laugh track one way or another. They were just always there. But as a TV critic, I've watched laugh tracks become contentious and deeply uncool. It's always fascinated me that something we barely noticed for so long, something that we maybe even kind of liked, could become so annoying to so many people so quickly. What changed? Why did they exist in the first place? Did we just realize they were really lame? And if so, what took us so long? From Slate Magazine, this is Dakota Ring, a show about cracking cultural mysteries. I'm Slate's TV critic, Willa Paskin, and every month I'll take a cultural object, idea, or habit and try to figure out where it comes from, what it means, and why it matters. Today, what happened to the laugh track? Imagine it's the 1950s. You've just gotten your very first television set. It weighs a ton, and it's the size of a bureau with wood paneling and a couple of dials on the side. You set it up in the living room, and you call on the whole family, and you turn it on. It's too late now, but ladies and gentlemen, I must tell you...
SPEAKER_12: It's the Jack Benny program. Originally a hit radio show, the series starred Benny, a one-time vaudeville performer and comedian, as a version of himself, a radio star. And now that show from the radio? It's on your television, and even though you've heard it before, you've never seen anything like it. Before, when you watched a performance, it was in public with an audience, and now it's happening in your house. Think about how strange, how new that must have been, and then listen. You hear it? Something recognizable, something reassuring, something that tells you what you're watching. Laughter. It was my sponsor who didn't have the nerve.
SPEAKER_12: That's how most early TV comedies were recorded, in front of a live audience, oftentimes in studios in New York. By the early 50s, as the TV industry moved away from New York and into Hollywood, executives wanted to move away from this traditional approach of broadcasting what amounted to live stage shows. They wanted to shoot comedies on film. Comedies that weren't live, but that still sounded live. The solution to this problem? The laugh track. And the person who came up with the solution? Charles Douglas. Charlie. Douglas was a mechanical engineer who had worked on radar for the Navy in World War II, so he knew his way around audio and electronics. In 1950, The Hank and McCune Show, a mostly forgotten series from NBC, had used a rudimentary laugh track. But by 1953, Douglas had developed a better way to insert a laugh into a show. If you've ever watched an old sitcom, you've almost certainly heard his work.
SPEAKER_15: Now we lift up the dryers and see how their hair turned out.
SPEAKER_12: I asked Ron Simon, curator of television and radio at the Paley Center, formerly the Museum of Television and Radio, what he knew. Charlie Douglas took the concept of just adding laughter, probably from a transcription disc, to create a machine that could do it. And he created this little box using laughter from Marcel Marceau and from Red Skelton from the silent sequences.
SPEAKER_11: And he created tape loops that could then be injected into film comedy to make it a live experience. Douglas then poured over these laughs at his kitchen table night after night.
SPEAKER_12: He spliced them into analog tape reels that could be played on a patented device Douglas had built himself out of household appliances, organ parts, and vacuum tubes. The device was about three feet tall, the shape of a filing cabinet, very heavy, and had slots for 32 reels, which could hold 10 laughs each. It was officially named the Audience Response Duplicator, but it became known as the Laugh Box. And that's laugh, spelled it the Goofy 50 style. L-A-F-F. The Laugh Box is this weird machine that's closer to, we'll say steampunk, than it is to modern electronic technology.
SPEAKER_11: Like an adding machine where you just press these dials and laughter would happen. Eventually it would evolve into more of a typewriter thing where you would punch keys. The Laugh Box could chuckle. It could laugh with side relief.
SPEAKER_12: It even had a reel, controlled by the foot pedal, that was just titters. Tiny little one-person laughs. At its most sophisticated, the box had 320 laughs. It could play one laugh at a time by pressing one key, or by pressing multiple keys together, it could play a bunch of laughs at once.
SPEAKER_16: So if you thought something was remotely funny, you'd say, let's have this guy laugh right here. And you'd just have that going. And maybe he'd come back and watch it and say, you know what, that wasn't quite as funny as the producer's gonna want it. So maybe he would add a second sound like this. And then he would add it all together and mix it together so you hear the full product. Three separate clips overlapped. What would happen was the producer or the director would come back and see his work and say, you know what, that could use a much louder laugh. And you'd give it a louder guffaw, and he'd say, alright, sure. So he'd throw something in just like that.
SPEAKER_12: Because Laugh Boxes were patented and handmade by Douglas, it wasn't like just anyone could make or use one. There were only a handful of working models at a time, and he basically had a monopoly on the process. By the 1960s, almost all sitcoms were single-camera shows filmed without an audience and tricked out with a raucous Charlie Douglas laugh track. The Boxes supplied laughter for tens of thousands of episodes of television. Tens of thousands. Maybe even more. Everything from the Munsters bewitched the Beverly Hillbillies' Gilligan's Island to Mary Tyler Moore and Cheers. For decades, their sound was ubiquitous, but Douglas didn't want to talk about his device. Douglas, whenever he went to a show, would cover it over and no one would actually see him at work.
SPEAKER_11: There is something, you know, embarrassing. It was certainly part of history, but not many producers want to talk about it and really actually talk about how the last sausage was actually made.
SPEAKER_12: Douglas hardly ever gave interviews or spoke about his work. A 1966 piece from TV Guide titled The Hollywood Sphinx and His Laugh Box, in which the Sphinx is Douglas, described the mystery surrounding the man and his device. The author wrote,
SPEAKER_02: If the laugh box should start acting strangely, the laugh boys wheel it into the men's room, locking the door behind them, so no one can peek. I mention the name Charlie Douglas and it's like Cosa Nostra. Everybody starts whispering. It's the most taboo topic in TV.
SPEAKER_12: I want to say here that every knock on the laugh track that you've ever heard, that it's fake, that it's corny, that it's cheating, that it's not funny, that it thinks audiences are dumb, people have been saying since the beginning. And that's part of the reason for Douglas's silence. But listening to Douglas's laughs, hearing Paul try to recreate them, it changed how I thought about them. I've always prided myself on being open-minded about the laugh track. A funny show is a funny show, with or without one. But even so, I always thought of them as automated, mechanical. But they aren't really that at all. They're a craft. Charlie Douglas played his laugh box like it was an instrument, literally. A lot of people think it was just a bunch of laughs thrown into a tape machine and someone's pushing the button. It was an art. I mean, he took it very seriously.
SPEAKER_12: Here's one of Charlie's laughs. It was used in the late 60s and 70s, including in the pilot for MASH. You hear the laughter telling off at the end? I love that. It tells a story in a single laugh. There's a joke, but one guy in the audience, he doesn't get it right away. He's a split second late, and then he laughs a little bit longer. Here, listen to it again. Charlie Douglas wasn't just a sound engineer. He was a psychologist. The rap on the laugh track is that it's fake laughter from a fake audience. But that's not quite right. The laugh track doesn't just represent a bogus audience. It represents an audience of one. Of Charlie Douglas. He definitely goosed laughs at producers' instructions, but to a large extent he and the people who worked for him followed their guts. It's incredible that one man's taste and sense of humor were so important in pacing an entire type of television comedy. But it's true. So how did the laugh track-driven era of TV come to an end? How did the laugh track go from being a tittering companion to an annoyance? To answer that, I think we need to think about the laugh track as not just a habit or an object, but an idea. An idea about why we laugh. I'm going to get to another idea about laughter later on, but this first one, I think it makes the laugh track of the 50s and 60s make a lot more sense. Here, I want you to listen to something. Something that people once thought was really funny.
SPEAKER_12: That menacing sequence is from the OK Laughing Record. OK, O-K-E-H, is the name of the record label that released it in 1922. It was recorded a few years earlier in Germany, and it's the sound of a cornet being interrupted by a hysterically laughing woman who was joined by a hysterically laughing man. That's it. It goes on for two and a half minutes. Two and a half creepy, creepy minutes. But in 1922, people thought it was hilarious. The OK Laughing Record was a huge novelty hit. There's speculation it sold over a million copies. It spawned an entire mini-genre of novelty laughing records. The laugh track, it's a version of the OK Laughing Record. It's trying to make you laugh just by listening to other people laugh. What's funny must be the laughter, because it's not the joke. There is no joke. But this particular approach to humor, it's not that popular right now. To find someone to defend it, I had to talk to one of Paul's friends, Ben Glenn. He's an art historian by training, but he's also a devoted laugh track enthusiast. He and Paul are in the same Charlie Douglas Facebook group.
SPEAKER_18: If you think about a show that relies heavily on a laugh track like Bewitched or The Munsters, if you didn't have it, it just wouldn't be funny.
SPEAKER_12: Well, does that mean that show's just actually bad and it was using this crutch?
SPEAKER_18: Well, yes, partly. But somebody getting a pie in the face and then there's silence is not funny. Right? Somebody getting the pie in the face with a huge laugh, that's funny.
SPEAKER_12: I found this, that does a tree falling in the forest make a sound? Zen Cohen of sitcom laughter, genuinely perplexing. Is a pie in the face funny if no one laughs? Is an episode of Friends funny if no one laughs? That's what I wondered after coming across this video, posted on YouTube by the user S-Boss, a Friends without a laugh track. Where is the waitress? I'm starving. It's a buffet, man. Here's where I win all my money back.
SPEAKER_12: You can hear what the rhythm of the show is supposed to be, how the pacing depends upon there being laughter. Without it, Friends sounds weird and unnatural. If there's no audience laughter, it's suddenly stark how odd it is that the characters aren't trying to make each other laugh. Friends needs its laughs to be funny, even if some of them are fake. Has anyone seen Rach? She's upstairs not doing the dishes.
SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you something, you know, I'm not doing them this time. I don't care if those dishes just sit in the sink until they're all covered with... I'll do them when I get home.
SPEAKER_12: The transition away from the laugh track started slowly. In the 70s, with Norman Lear sitcoms like All in the Family, comedy started to be taped in front of a live studio audience again. The audience's laughs would be smoothed out, edited, or boosted. This is a process called sweetening, which Douglas had done a lot of and still happens all the time. But the aim, already, was that the laughs should sound more realistic. In the 80s and 90s, some shows, like The Wonder Years, The Larry Sanders Show, and The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, started to experiment with dropping the laugh track. But TV's biggest hits, shows like Cheers, Seinfeld, and Friends, still had them. By the late 90s, with the rise of cable and unlaughtracked animated series like The Simpsons, even the network started contemplating making different kinds of comedies, setting up a collision between the old idea about comedy, and the typical way of doing things, and a new idea about comedy, and a new way of shooting a TV show. Caught in that collision? Aaron Sorkin's Sports Night.
SPEAKER_03: You're watching Sports Night on CSC, so come on back. We're out. Two and a half minutes back.
SPEAKER_12: In 1997, Sorkin sold Sports Night, his first TV show, to ABC. It was a comedy set behind the scenes of an ESPN-style sports network. Sorkin and the director, Tommy Shillame, wanted to shoot it like a single-camera show. The set had four walls, the camera moved, and they wanted to shoot it without a laugh track. ABC? Not so much. They wanted to do something different, but not that different. Here's Shillame.
SPEAKER_14: The economics of television, and certainly half-hour television, was so massive for shows that had had traditional laugh tracks, that they were really very nervous about giving that up completely. What did you feel like the laugh track meant about your show?
SPEAKER_12: Here's what it is. The sort of base tone of a situational comedy is the laugh track.
SPEAKER_14: I think we're familiar with it. I think it sort of resonates in a certain way. But I think it is kind of establishing a conceptual idea about a show that is saying, it's not real. This is a theatrical presentation. I'm there with this group of people. We're all laughing. It's fun. That was not the idea of the way I think Aaron wrote or what I think Sports Night was about.
SPEAKER_12: Here's a clip of the laugh track from the Sports Night pilot.
SPEAKER_15: Yeah, but the point I'm making is that I can't... who is this?
SPEAKER_05: I'm Jeremy Goodwin. Oh, you're here for the associate producer job. Yes, and let me just say that it is an extraordinary honor to be here.
SPEAKER_12: Sports Night was one of the first shows where, as a viewer, I could really feel that the laugh track was holding the show back. Sports Night is fast. It doesn't want to pause to wait for the audience's laughter. So the laughs have to be shoehorned into the rare breaks in Sorkin's dense dialogue, where they sound even faker than usual, dispatches from a whole other sensibility. What you can hear starting to happen with Sports Night is the laugh track changing from background noise into an impediment. It's actively keeping Sports Night from being as funny and fast, from being as good as it could be. After its first few episodes, Sports Night stopped being taped in front of an audience at all, and the laughter got even fainter. Here's a clip from an episode at the end of season one.
SPEAKER_04: Yes. Yes. You're breaking up now. Hello? You're breaking up. Now you're not there at all. There's nobody there at all. Yet I'm still talking. All right.
SPEAKER_12: For its second season, ABC let the show drop the laugh track entirely. But it was canceled at the end of that season anyway, in 2000, just ever so slightly ahead of its time. The laugh track-free British version of The Office premiered in 2001. In 2003, Arrested Development started airing on Fox. In 2005, the American adaptation of The Office started airing on NBC, the first huge hit without a laugh track. That same year, Everybody Loves Raymond won the Emmy for Best Comedy. That's the last time a sitcom with a laugh track has done so. The end of the laugh track era. So what changed? I want to talk about another theory about laughter that's different from the pie-in-the-face theory I mentioned earlier. In this theory, laughter isn't a fundamentally social activity, something that we do just because everyone else is doing it. It's something deeply, wonderfully individual and idiosyncratic, a reaction to the quality of the joke itself. Representing this point of view is the TV writer Andy Secunda. Andy's now a writer on the current ABC sitcom The Goldbergs, which doesn't have a laugh track. But his first show, the 2004 UPN sitcom Love Incorporated, about modern-day matchmakers, did. But that's not fair. I have a dream too.
SPEAKER_05: What's your dream? To have 10,000 more dollars.
SPEAKER_16: I'm talking about $10,000 to help improve the human condition.
SPEAKER_05: Well $10,000 will help improve this human's condition very much. Before working on Love Incorporated, Andy had been a writer for Conan and a teacher and performer at the improv comedy powerhouse, Upright Citizens Brigade.
SPEAKER_12: I was an alternative comedy snob and coming out of the New York scene, already was like every show with a laugh track,
SPEAKER_07: other than Seinfeld is, you know, passe, a dinosaur.
SPEAKER_12: But Andy didn't have the clout to keep Love Incorporated from having a laugh track. The show was performed in front of a studio audience and they had some real laughs. But then a sound editor came in to sweeten it, boosting and manipulating all of them. So the real laughs were replaced by a laugh track. But Andy didn't want to use that laugh track in the typical way.
SPEAKER_07: I guess my take was, well, since we're doing this anyway, why don't we just decide what's funny? To me, I was like, well, it's going to be this creation, this false thing. Why go halfway? Just make the whole thing a fiction. I want to train the audience that's watching at home, who's not really paying that much attention anyway, in my head. In other words, Andy wanted to rig the laugh track to reflect what was really funny.
SPEAKER_12: He understood how the laugh track is supposed to work, that it's supposed to make people laugh at what other people are laughing at. But he wanted to retrofit it to account for the second theory of laughter, to tell audiences, hey, some jokes are just funnier than others and you should laugh at those. Andy didn't succeed. His boss wouldn't have it. But even so, you can see, he may be skeptical of the laughter of the crowd, but he believes in the objective quality of the joke.
SPEAKER_07: You may be able to get a big laugh out of an audience and be not that great a comic. I mean, a lot of comics would argue, well, if you get the laugh, then you are a great comic. I disagree, because I'm a snob.
SPEAKER_12: Andy may be a snob, but his perspective has become widespread. This is how lots of people think about comedy now, me included. Some jokes just are better than others, and you can't tell simply based on what got the biggest laugh, especially when that laugh comes from a laugh track. For decades, TV was ruled by this idea that laughter is socially contingent, and then that idea was surpassed by this other idea, that laughter is idiosyncratic and individual. But this was a big transition. For some viewers, the laugh track didn't just stop encouraging laughter, it started inhibiting it. The laugh track broke. Today, shows with laugh tracks have been almost entirely cut out of the critical conversation, but they still have their modern day defenders and uses, especially in the revivals of beloved shows that had laugh tracks, like Will & Grace. Netflix's 2017 reboot of Norman Lear's One Day at a Time, a show about a divorced Cuban-American veteran with PTSD, raising her son and teenage daughter while living with her mother, is great. It's smart, it's charming, it's queer, and it has a laugh track, too. She has to have a kinsis. How else will we know the day that our little girl becomes a woman?
SPEAKER_00: You missed it. I was 12, I was in gym, and ironically, it happened at first period.
SPEAKER_12: So, just so you know, this is a podcast we're doing about the laugh track. I'm wanting to talk to you guys because you do a great show that has a laugh track. It doesn't have a laugh track, it's actually a live audience.
SPEAKER_13: I knew you were going to say that, but we're going to talk about all that in detail.
SPEAKER_12: That's Gloria Calderon-Kellit and Mike Royce, the showrunners of One Day at a Time. They're right. Their show is filmed in front of a live audience, as was the original. Mike and Gloria say their sound editor cuts down on the aahs and the more excessive whoops for Rita Moreno, and even trims down some laughs, but they say there's no sweetening in their show. When I said it was a laugh track, like, why does that bother you so much? Some people just don't like to hear other people laughing because it feels like they're being told what to do.
SPEAKER_17: But part of that comes from, I think, feeling like the laughter is somehow fakely added on. Mike is right. That is how some people feel about the laugh track.
SPEAKER_12: That it's a false advertisement trying to sell you a bad joke as though it's a good one. And sometimes that is what the laugh track is. So I asked why it was worth risking that kind of reaction.
SPEAKER_13: For me it's about a shared experience. So I feel like it's an opportunity to experience a play in the comfort of your home, but you're experiencing it as though you are a part of a community. We want them to experience the emotions, audibly. You know, like, there is something about that. The crying too, by the way.
SPEAKER_12: For Gloria and Mike, the laugh track is a reminder that other people are there, watching with you, even when you're all alone. Just like it has been from the very beginning.
SPEAKER_02: I want to go back to that scene from earlier, when you turned on the TV for the first time,
SPEAKER_12: and saw the Jack Benny program, and it was so new and strange. When you heard the audience laughing, it was a cue that you should laugh too. Yes. But also, it was a sign. A sign that you weren't watching alone. The laugh track was trying to bridge the bizarre new distance between the audience and the performers, between the audience and other members of the audience. The thing you have to remember, and this is so different than now, is that the laugh track was trying to overcome a defect of television, which is that unlike vaudeville and the movies, you watched it all by yourself. Now that defect, that you don't have to go anywhere or interact with anyone while you watch it, that's one of TV's biggest selling points. And the laugh track, it helped us to get to that point. For a long time, the laugh track seemed permanent, but it was really more like training wheels, something that taught us this new skill of watching and laughing in solitude. It might have stuck around way too long, but it did its job really well. By the late 90s and early aughts, when the numbers of shows on cable started to skyrocket and the TV audience began to fragment, we were totally ready to move from one theory of laughter to another, to embrace the idea of ourselves as individuals with idiosyncratic comedic taste, who did not need or even want the laugh track's lame chortle of approval to know what was funny. These days, it's the laugh track that seems weird and vestigial, a sound from another time, unless we're specifically after the theatrical communal throwback experience of a show like One Day at a Time. The laugh track has always been a tool, and nearly 70 years after it was invented, there's nothing to fix. Watching TV alone isn't the weird activity. Watching together is. As multi-camera comedies with laugh tracks have faded, single-camera comedies without laughs have only gotten more and more adventurous, leading to a whole upheaval in what constitutes a comedy, full stop. Many of the buzziest, most well-regarded comedies, like Atlanta and Girls and Transparent, are more funny-adjacent than laugh-out-loud funny. They aren't after that big, big laugh. Making people laugh is really, really hard. One shortcut from decades ago was to fake that laughter. A more modern fix is not to worry about whether audiences are really happy, and a more modern fix is not to worry about whether audiences are laughing at all.
SPEAKER_10: My littlest baggage would probably be my IBS, and my medium baggage would be that I truly don't love my grandmother. Like, you don't love her at all? Just what would your biggest baggage be? That I'm a virgin. Obviously.
SPEAKER_12: Even if they're not laughing, audiences are finding makeshift ways to watch communally. If you're the present-day technological equivalent of the laugh track, look at social media. Sitting on your couch, reading Twitter while you watch Atlanta, or a football game, or The Bachelor, those tweets are a signal about what's good and what's interesting. Sometimes, they're just the show's best jokes, tweeted verbatim. Often, those tweets will make you laugh. They'll definitely keep you from feeling like you're watching all alone. Learning the history of the laugh track, thinking about it as a way to foster a feeling of togetherness, it really made me wonder. Is solo binging with headphones on, while the person in the very same room as you watches something else, really better than gathering around one of three channels, politely putting up with canned laughter? In one of these experiences, you definitely get to decide what's funny for yourself. But you really are doing it all alone. I think this is part of what drives laugh track aficionados like Paul Iverson. When he tinkers with laugh tracks and adds them back in to old episodes of The Pink Panther or The Monkees, he's recapturing the spirit of a different time, a different way of watching television, when laughter wasn't a judgment, but a companion. When I asked Paul what his favorite Charlie Douglas laugh was, he had one, of course. He got right to the heart of it. It was basically a deep man's laugh that was used sparingly,
SPEAKER_16: and then it started to get used more regularly, and it sounds like this.
SPEAKER_16: When we heard that one, my sister would say, There's your friend.
SPEAKER_06: The Pink Panther You've been listening to Decoder Ring, hosted by Willa Paskin. Decoder Ring is a brand new podcast from Slate. It was produced and edited by Benjamin Frisch. You can find out more about the show at slate.com slash decoderring, or just go subscribe to it wherever you get your podcasts. It's good. You're going to like it. One of the shows in radio-topia is the West Wing Weekly, and the co-host of that show is Joshua Molina, who starred in the show Sports Night, one of my favorite television shows of all time, and is cited as the tipping point moment of the laugh track. So I asked him what it was like to act in a TV show that was slowly turning down the laugh track over the course of the series. We have that conversation after this. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors, and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva Magic Resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com, the home for every brand. Article believes in delightful design for every home. And thanks to their online only model, they have some really delightful prices too. Their curated assortment of mid-century modern coastal, industrial, and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality, and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress-free. I think my favorite piece of furniture in my house is the geome sideboard. Maslow picked it out. Remember Maslow? And I keep my vinyl records and CDs in it. It just is awesome. I love the way it looks. Article is offering 99% invisible listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit Article.com slash 99 and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's Article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. Joshua Molina is the co-host of Radio Topia's The West Wing Weekly podcast with Rishikesh Herway. Joshua is also an actor on the side. He recently wrapped up a seven-year run on Scandal. He was also on the West Wing. But he got his big break in television as Jeremy Goodwin on another Aaron Sorkin creation, Sports Night. Sports Night was a strange and beautiful half-hour comedy with strong dramatic elements and the rapid-fire dialogue that people would embrace more fully on the West Wing. But as was mentioned in the documentary you just heard, Sports Night marked the beginning of the end for the laugh track. I asked Joshua if he was aware of that dynamic at the time. It was always my understanding that Aaron objected strenuously to the inclusion of a laugh track on Sports Night and for that matter to the inclusion of a live audience in the studio as we filmed what was essentially a single-camera comedy.
SPEAKER_03: So it was kind of being forced into a hybrid of which Aaron did not approve. And did you feel the tension of it being either a fish nor a fowl when you were acting in it?
SPEAKER_06: Yes. I think as a performer and as somebody coming from a theater background and perhaps somebody who's a little bit of an innate ham, it is hard to ignore the presence of 90 people in a room where you're making a show, hopefully for millions of people to watch at home.
SPEAKER_03: And there is something different between a performance for camera and a live performance. And so while the priority ought to be the home viewing audience, I found it difficult not to play to the people who were in the room with me. While I'm very happy with my performance in the pilot, it's large. It's possible one can detect my playing to the live audience when perhaps I should have toned it down a little bit. But if you're asking me for genuinely sophisticated analyses and I sense that you are, you've got to give me some time, at least 20 minutes.
SPEAKER_03: As the laugh track itself was slowly muted, I think maybe my performance got a little bit smaller, a little more finely realized.
SPEAKER_06: So I think I need to back up a little bit to understand. So there is a live audience for the first season or what was the setup actually?
SPEAKER_03: There was a live audience for I think as long as there was a laugh track. And when Tommy Shlomme and Aaron Sorkin finally outwitted ABC simply by dialing it down a bit episode by episode until it was gone. So they never won the explicit argument about a laugh track. ABC never said, fine, get rid of the laugh track. They just got rid of it so slowly. It's that thing, I guess, where you boil a frog. And it was de facto they had gotten rid of the laugh track by the time ABC seemed to notice. So my memory is that that was somewhere around episode seven or eight. And having disposed of the laugh track, we disposed of the live audience. It was already a weird situation to have the audience there when we were moving around trying to make our single camera comedy. And so there really was no existential point to the live audience once the laugh track was removed.
SPEAKER_06: It was one of those rare instances where I think that a lot of us who grew up on television, the laugh track was just part of sitcoms. And this was a very different sitcom. Did you feel the sense of this tension as an audience member as well as a person crafting this thing? Yes. I'm not a big fan of laugh tracks altogether. Somehow in the golden age of TV, if the show's in black and white and feels like a theater piece anyway, like The Honeymooners looks like they're putting on a play. It kind of works and has sort of an old school resonance for me.
SPEAKER_03: Certainly for what we were doing, which was creating a piece that included elements of comedy and drama, it just felt odd. It felt weird as we were making it. And when I watched it, that sweetened, super artificial laugh track, I think does not elevate the show.
SPEAKER_06: And so over the course of the first season, while the laugh track was being dialed down surreptitiously, did you intuitively know to change your performance slightly? Was that communicated to you in some way or not? I don't think it was made explicit. I think I just settled into the natural rhythm of acting for the camera. I think the best piece of advice I got as a young actor learning how to act on film was always remember that the camera can read your mind.
SPEAKER_03: And that's a very different piece of advice from make sure your performance reaches the person in the last row of the balcony. And so there are baked-in inherent differences between a live performance and a performance for camera. And so once the audience was actually gone, I think I just settled into, okay, we're making a TV show and that camera is going to get in really close when it needs to. And I could just sort of let go the idea of trying to project anything. So what do you think of Sports Night being this pivotal moment in laugh track history?
SPEAKER_03: The situation with the laugh track and ABC versus Aaron and Tommy reflected a very significant misunderstanding on the network's part of what the show was.
SPEAKER_03: And so I think it's just one offshoot of they're not quite knowing what they had or what to do with Sports Night. And I think we're very used to seeing single camera comedies and we're used to seeing television shows that one might have difficulty classifying as a comedy or a drama. I don't know why this was such a, you know, why things are so binary, you know, 20 years ago. Now we're a little bit more sophisticated as an audience and we understand that much like life, TV shows can have moments of drama and moments of comedy. But I think at the time, ABC didn't quite know how to handle what Aaron and Tommy were giving them. And the laugh track was a reflection of that tension.
SPEAKER_06: Like a lot of things, the first guy through the wall gets the bloodiest. And then we've all benefited from that fight because of West Wing and 30 Rock and all these things that I think you could point to this moment and go the Pyrrhic victory of Sports Night made it so that all this other great TV happened as well. You have to understand, I think of Sports Night as this complete success. Like, I love it so much. This strange little object, it fought a battle that really changed a lot of television that we admire today. I agree with you. It feels like a platitude to say that anything was before its time or that's why we didn't do better because we were before our time.
SPEAKER_03: But I think it's actually an apt phrase here and I do think Aaron Sorkin and Tommy Shlomme in terms of the material that Aaron was writing and the way that Tommy was filming it, I think they were truly a little bit ahead of the curve. And it did ultimately take a little more time for audiences to come around for this type of material. But I agree with you. Look, we did 45 episodes. We got a couple seasons and I feel happy that I was part of it and proud of what we ultimately put out.
SPEAKER_06: Joshua Molina is the co-host of the West Wing Weekly, an addictive and rigorous discussion of the TV show The West Wing. Trust me, it's great and the community they've formed around the podcast is just like this warm embrace. So proud to have them part of the Radio-Topia crew. 99% invisible is Avery Truffleman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Sharif Yousif, Taryn Mazza, composer Shawn Rial, digital director Kurt Kohlstedt, senior editor Delaney Hall, senior producer Katie Mingle and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are a part of Radio-Topia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative, nicest smelling shows in all of podcasting. We are supported by our listeners just like you. You can find 99% Invisible and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr and Reddit too. But I bet even the most dedicated of you hasn't heard every episode of 99% Invisible and you can remedy that by downloading them all right now on your favorite podcasting app. I recommend Radio Public, but they also live beside words and videos and pictures and a bunch of other design stories at 99pi.org. Radio-Topia from PRX.
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