Charlie Douglass, inventor of the main device used to inject canned laughter into TV shows, has died. Here's a link to an obit, and I think we can all imagine the Saturday Night Live sketch: Someone delivering a sombre, tearful eulogy for Charlie while a guy at a machine "sweetens" it and lays in the guffaws. And I think we can count on a Leno monologue joke: Jay, in a serious tone, announces something along the lines of, "The inventor of the laugh track died today," and then they dub in some huge audience reaction.
People always say they hate it when a show has obvious canned laughter. I think it's worse when it isn't obvious — like when it's done on a live show, just in case the studio audience isn't yukking it up. Bob "Can you believe I'm this old?" Hope reportedly insisted, when he hosted the Oscars, that Charlie and his mysterious box be engaged and at the ready to augment the response. There's also a difference of honesty between sweetening a film show — like M*A*S*H or Get Smart — which a reasonably-intelligent person knows does not have a live audience, and hyping up the track for a show that pretends you're hearing actual human beings. (In a perverse way, I liked the occasional attempts, as on some early broadcasts of The Flintstones and Rocky and His Friends, to apply canned laughter to animation. Who did they think we'd think was watching the performance and laughing at it? Other cartoon characters?)
On the other hand, there can be a downside to real laughter. There are shows that have been done in front of an audience where, it seemed to me, the performers/writers were stooping to the kind of material that delights the in-studio watchers and leaves us at home out of the loop. The most obvious offenders in this regard are when Leno or Letterman will come out and lead-off with a line that plays back on something that was said in the pre-show warm-up. Big laugh from all those present but a big "?" to us. I suspect that some programs — M*A*S*H would be the best example — would not have been as good had the authors had to constantly think of evoking that audible response from a studio audience.
Maybe the best thing would be if we could learn to laugh at comedies on an individual basis. Anyway, let's note a moment of hysterics for Charlie Douglass…