I'll Have a Can of Laughs, Please

Have you read anyone defending laugh tracks?

You’re about to.

Anyone who watched filmed TV comedies in the 1960s (especially in daily reruns) came to recognise the same laughs over and over and over. Then there was the ridiculousness of laugh tracks on cartoons (ABC demanded one on The Flintstones over Hanna-Barbera’s objections).

On live shows, adding laughs could ruin the comedy, as the people on stage had to figure out how long to wait for their next line as the reactions didn’t exist until added in production after the show.

But no less a comedian than Jack Benny thought there was a place for a laugh machine. He explained his feelings to one of newspaperdom’s favourite Benny quoters. This was found in the Camden Courier-Post on Dec. 7, 1959 and later in other papers.

Benny’s Success Secret—Timing
By EARL WILSON
NEW YORK—Jack Benny would like to confess right now that he used canned laughter recently —with no less a guest star than Harry Truman.
When all that furor about “honesty" and "realism" in TV was raging, CBS president Frank Staunton said canned laughter would have to go—but Jack figures there was a misunderstanding because nobody from the CBS brass asked him to drop it.
"When you film a show, you almost have to have it," Jack remarked a few days ago at the Sherry-Netherland while relaxing late in the afternoon in a dressing gown.
"We filmed the Truman interview in the library in Independence. He was saying some very funny things.
"For him to have said these things without any laugh response would have been deadly. Furthermore, I know that when Harry Truman says something funny, an audience is going to scream more at him than at a comedian." Laughter Important
And so the canned laughter was inserted—with Jack personally doing the editing.
"Could this have been the canned laughter from some old Fred Allen show, the laughs being from people who are now dead?" I asked Jack.
"I don't know where we get them," Jack shrugged. "I just know that they're important."
"You have to know which joke is worth a tiny giggle, which one gets a shriek, and which one gets a roar that will lead to applause."
Probably Jack's attention to such details of laughter is responsible for his reputation for having such great timing.
"Nobody can explain timing," Jack said. Nevertheless, he has his ear carefully attuned to it during a show. And fearing that some guest star may not understand timing as thoroughly as he does, he will flash a cue to the guest. He'll tell the guest in advance, "Wait till the first laugh simmers down, and then when I look at you, but not until then, you read your next line."
Jack's "pauses," generally accepted as the secret of his timing, have had strange results. Playing the Palladium in London, he permitted Phil Harris to insult him onstage.
Phil had been pretty smart-alecky about his boss in the routine and had strutted off after saying, "I'll be back again, folks, because the old man needs me."
"I got a big laugh just standing there glaring at the audience," Jack said. "The audience could read my mind: 'I'm paying this so-and-so big money and all he does is insult me.' I could keep the laugh going as long as I wanted to. The laughing went on so long one night, that finally somebody up in the gallery yelled, 'For God's sake. Mr. Benny, say something!' That got the biggest laugh of all."
Jack thought of planting a spectator there to do it every night but decided against it because impromptu laughs generally are better than planned ones.

On radio, studio audiences provided the laughter. Fred Allen hated them because he felt they didn’t get the jokes, so there were no laughs and it screwed up his timing. Henry Morgan tried to do comedy without an audience for the same reason. The experiment lasted one show. Then there were Bob and Ray who never needed laughs on radio; they treated their show like a jock shift, not a studio comedy/variety.

Jack Benny, as you read above, had a fine sense of timing when it came to laughs. But changing to a transcribed radio show changed the laughs. Jack milked them. He waited until they died down before going on to the next line.

The transcribed shows are different. Some of the shows are overwritten so they tried to squeeze everything in by having dialogue jump in while the laughs are being heard (the show would have been mixed that way in production after recording). One bad example is the end of the “grass reek” show; Jack’s tail line has obviously been edited over top of the laughs.

Regardless, Jack got plenty of laughs from real people in real time over the years. It’s why his career lasted so long.