The Laff Box was invented in the 1950s by sound engineer Charley Douglass. Its purpose was to add pre-recorded laughter to TV sitcoms in post-production. The contraption was played like an organ, with over 30 buttons for different types of laughter and a foot pedal to control the length of the response. The Laff Box was typically used to enhance the reaction of a studio audience that wasn’t laughing enough. In some cases, it even replaced the need for a live audience altogether – just think of classic sitcoms like M*A*S*H or The Munsters where the laughs seem to roar out of nowhere.

Douglass’ invention demonstrates that laughter can ignite and spread without any initial spark, ex nihilo. The Laff Box, and its digital equivalent, tells us that we’re not necessarily laughing at the jokes in TV shows. We’re laughing because other people are laughing too, like a comedy version of Pavlov’s dog. This becomes clear in edited clips of popular sitcoms uploaded on YouTube that have had their laugh tracks removed. Instead of laugher, we hear a few seconds of eerie silence after a mediocre one-liner or a moment of limp slapstick. Stripped of artificial yuks, cheesy sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory or How I Met Your Mother strike us as hopelessly awkward and unfunny. Sometimes laughter is enough; jokes are optional.

Yet there’s another turn of the screw. We find ourselves laughing at YouTube videos like ‘Big Bang Theory But Without the Laugh Track *CRINGE*’ or ‘How I Met Your Mother Except the Laugh Track is Wind Sounds’ precisely because they’re so awkward and unfunny, in the same way that we laugh at a joke when it falls flat. As comedy connoisseurs, we look down on any show that needs to use canned laughter to force a chuckle out of its audience. We know better and prefer our sitcoms to be smart and sassy, sitcoms that let the viewer spot the jokes for themselves. TV shows like Parks and Recreation and Veep don’t patronize their audiences with fake laughter, but allow humour to rise organically from audio-visual cues. By contrast, The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother deserve our ridicule because they’re seemingly unaware of just how unfunny they really are, an uncomfortable truth that’s exposed by eliminating their laugh tracks.