Video Introduces You To The Man Behind The TV Sitcom Laugh Tracks of the 80s

Have you ever been curious about the laugh tracks that were used in the 1980 TV sitcoms? I don’t remember why, but when I was growing up we called it “dead people laughing”. I still think that when I hear laugh tracks.

Anyway, I’ve got an interesting short doc from the 80s that takes us behind the scenes of the laugh tracks and how they were added to the TV shows.

The laugh track was developed by sound engineer Carroll Pratt, and he helped create the “laff box” with fellow sound engineer Charley Douglass in the late 1950s. By the 1980s, Pratt and his brother started Sound One Studios, which provided the laugh tracks to almost all of the shows in the 80s in the U.S.