1953 Charlie Douglas’s “Laff Box” Discovered
Laugh Tracks: Ultra Rare Black Box Found!
This is an amazing find! From ‘Antiques Roadshow’ here is the video of the Charlie Douglas ‘Laff Box’, built in 1953, which was discovered among the items sold in a storage locker sale!
Back in the 50s and 60s, Charlie Douglas was ‘The Man’ for laugh tracks in Los Angeles and traveled with his top secret black box to sweeten the tracks on many famous shows.
He would wheel his black box of pre-recorded laughs into the post audio room, plug in to the mixing console, and proceed to treat the soundtrack with everything from chuckles to knee-slapping fits, to applause.
Understandably, Charlie and his son Bobby were very protective of the technology and the library of carefully categorized audience reactions inside that black box. Now remember, this was before cart machines, but when the close up comes, you’ll see the loops rotating and I think this technology was called the Mckinzie tape loop system. Thanks to Mark Sudock for the clip. Enjoy and Share!
I still don’t know how it got abandoned in a storage unit…
I love this!
What a great find. This machine belongs in the Smithstonian. Charlie and Bobby were the kings of sweetening until the birth of Sound One with John and Carrol Pratt. Add in Craig Porter and John Bicklehoff and you have the fore runners of the business. Now there are many others and they too are good, I just can’t recall the names.
Charlie was a very ingenious man. As you know, there wasn’t dialog on the tracks. So where did the laffs and titters come from? Charlie would record the audience during many of Red Skelton’s shows. Skelton did a lot of pantomime back in the 50’s and 60’s. So did The Great One, Jackie Gleason. Thus, clean tracks from the audience.
Very nice!
I worked with Charlie doing “sweetening” to my shows. He would ask, “Would you like a bigger guffah? How about some cackling followed by a few applause that grow into an ovation”. He completely changed the way we watch television. He made a solitary experience feel like a group experience. I believe he said he had recorded most of the laughs from early live Milton Berle TV shows. I know Berle told me he did.
Looks like an early version of the McKenzie cart machines, which predated the cartridges used in radio until the digital era. The laugh machine IIRC was also called Mrs. McKenzie for that very reason.
Those idiotic laugh trax were a major reason I never watched television.
A program with laugh tracks tells me that the program really isn’t funny, the producers know it, and they add this to tell everybody it’s funny.
Appraised for $10k on PBS. If he goes to Pawn Stars shop in Las Vegas, the ‘Old Man’ or Rick would cut him down for $1k, tops.
Used this a couple of times with Bobby, when we were editing at TAV, the old Merv Griffin facility in LA. They could also, uh, enhance, applause tracks…
Thanks! Very timely. We were just having a discussion about this last week,
One of the best, John Kantrow, at NBC, watched him “play” the McKinzie machine in a truck,live sweetening an Emmy broadcast back in early 80s. His brother Jim was the AD on the Tonight Show. Great guys.
I was shocked that this thing isn’t worth a WHOLE lot more than $10k. I would imagine a museum of broadcasting paying way more for something with such significance.
I have never really understood the concept of fake “laugh tracks” on comedy TV shows. I chuckle or laugh without help while watching something charming or funny. Do we need to be reminded that a show is supposed to be funny? If something is taped or filmed before a live studio audience, then the laughs are legitimate, and I get it. Otherwise…
I think it’s worth more than $ 10,000. Should go to the Paley TV Museum or the Smithsonian.
Very cool…
No wonder they all sounded exactly the same
Great video!!! Art Schneider, the Emmy-award winning video editor of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, tells the story in his book about the audio sweetening sessions where Charlie used his machine to put the laughs in the show, at Glen Glenn studios in Hollywood. As Art tells it, union technicians wouldn’t let Charlie Douglass in the door at NBC in Burbank! The audio for Laugh-In was mastered on a film workprint, and apparently Glen Glenn was better equipped to handle this than NBC.
The technology reminds me of the mellotron, a tape based musical instrument from the 1960s that the Beatles and many others used. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mellotron
The worst of the laugh tracks, to me was M*A*S*H. But they said CBS wouldn’t air it at the time without it