Love it or loathe it - or just go with it - the television laugh track remains a staple after five decades of viewer-assisted frivolity.
For that triumph or disgrace, one person can be thanked or blamed.
Charlie Douglass, who died in April at age 93, was a technical director of TV shows in the 1950s. He noticed that studio audiences didn't laugh as much when jokes were repeated after the first take.
So the mechanical and electrical engineer, who helped develop a shipboard radar for the Navy in World War II, created a "laff box" that would supply recorded audience reaction.
The original machine's diverse sounds - including titters, belly laughs, roars, moans, cries, jeers and "oohs" and "ahhs"- were captured at pantomime performances by Marcel Marceau and Red Skelton. That way, Douglass figured, no dialogue could mar the crowd response.
"He had this knack - he knew how to invent things," said Bob Douglass, the son who continues to run his family's "audience reaction company," Northridge Electronics in Los Angeles.
The first TV situation comedy to use the "laff box" was Life With Father in 1953, Bob Douglass said. Since then most every sitcom, from I Love Lucy to Everybody Loves Raymond, has relied on a laugh track to "sweeten" or replace the laughter and applause of live spectators.
No one was more surprised by canned laughter's immense success than Charlie Douglass, who was presented with a special engineering Emmy Award in 1992.
"My father thought he could make a good living with it," said Bob Douglass, himself a nine-time Emmy-winning sound mixer. "But he never expected it to snowball and be this big icon in the industry. It's pretty amazing. I think he did it with dignity and humor and personality. Everyone liked him, and they respected him."
Considering the faux audience responses also added to game shows, variety shows and other programs - even Super Bowl halftime shows - there's no denying that Charlie Douglass changed television for good. But did he change it for the better?
It's fair to say he tried.
"It's not only just inventing the equipment, but knowing when to put a laugh in and when not to put it in," Douglass said. "It was a compromise, of course. Some producers would tell him exactly where they wanted it. And other producers would just let him have free rein and do it the way he felt it, because he'd been in the business so long."
