The laugh track, otherwise known as the cringiest sound in modern television.

It's the sound we all love to hate, but it also peppers the soundscapes of some of our favorite shows.

There's good reason to wonder if the laugh track was ever really funny or if it was always destined for the TV hall of infamy.

So, today I want to dive into where this weird sound effect comes from, why it emerged, and why it's still punctuating punchlines in comedy shows today.

[upbeat music] So, when did canned laughter and fake yuks emerge, and why?

Well, for that piece of TV comedic history, we can all thank a man named Charles Douglass.

Gina Giotta, professor of communication and technology at California State University, Northridge, traces the laugh track's insertion into early television back to its non-visual mass-media predecessor, the radio.

According to Giotta, the laugh track wasn't originally about papering over terrible jokes and missed punchlines, but rather a way to control the unpredictable responses of studio audiences that were a holdover from radio broadcast days.

In the late 1920s, two comics named Eddie Cantor and Ed Wynn invented the live studio audience as a way to bring the rowdiness and animation of their vaudeville and live performances into the creepy quiet of the recording studio.

They decided that their performances and the jokes they told would be better if they were able to feed off the energy of real reactions of a studio audience.

So, they rallied up a group of stage hands to watch their show and laugh at their gags and punchlines.

While other comedians viewed the introduction of a bunch of audience plants as the equivalent of a comedic crutch, home listeners responded positively to the insertion of these audience surrogates.

In fact, most reported that the canned laughs made the performances more enjoyable rather than less funny, because it made them feel more at ease responding to the jokes at home.

But those early notes of "filmed in front of a studio audience" and the resulting laughter were more organic in the 1920s and '30s than they are today.

So, when did we take the leap from hiring folks to cut it up in the studio, to laugh tracks that either override or in some cases entirely replace organic audience laughter?

Well, that brings us to 1954 and back to Charles Douglass.

After serving as a radar engineer for the Navy in World War II, he returned home to work for CBS as the technical director of their LA studios.

He invented the "Laff Box," along with that kind of funky spelling, to smooth out the technical difficulties of relying on studio audiences during live broadcasts.

So, the track wasn't really meant to fix bad jokes.

Rather, it was meant to help out the bumpy transition early TV had as it moved from doing all live broadcasts to finally having prerecorded shows.

Douglass's recorded laughs also took out some of the audience response tics that are a normal part of live performance but can register as disorienting and grating to viewers at home.

For example, if there was one guy who kept laughing before the joke was over, his voice could be dimmed or edited out entirely.

And if a joke was particularly funny, so funny that the laughter didn't die down in time for people to catch the next bit of dialogue, then it could be tuned out entirely so that viewers at home could actually hear show.

Giotta also notes that laugh tracks helped to differentiate early television as a medium that was separate from film.

Before technology allowed us to watch movies at home, films were reserved for movie theaters, which already had audience response built in, because there were audiences.

Early TV needed a way for folks at home to differentiate the prerecorded scripted shows from moving pictures, and the laugh track helped to sweeten that move.

So, they served a rather technical purpose at the beginning of TV history.

But why did this noise that usually gets bashed for making us flinch more than it makes us laugh actually stick around?

Well, the short answer is we're all a bunch of lying liars because as much as we love to hate on the laugh track, research shows it still kind of works.

Even though the laugh-track gag has become synonymous with the idea of mass-produced shows and the absence of genuine humor, that isn't always the case.

Many multi-camera shows that still use laugh tracks are actually still shot in front of a live studio audience.

Think classic sitcoms like "Seinfeld" or "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air."

But often those shows have sound engineers who will sweeten the sound of the audience to facilitate the recording.

So, the yuks are real, but the volume, duration and pitch can be slightly altered to smooth out the rough edges.

Also, according to a 2004 journal article by Joseph M. Moran, et al, from the Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College, those canned laugh tracks are sometimes placed where real laughter already occurs.

In a test, they ran episodes of "Seinfeld," which has a laugh track, and episodes of "The Simpsons," which doesn't.

The episodes were both played, and the study found that moments detected as humorous remain roughly the same regardless of whether or not the laugh track kicked in to indicate when the audience should laugh.

And in the case of "Seinfeld," the show that already has a laugh track embedded into the episodes, "laugh track moments can be considered "to have a greater percentage of humorous content than the remainder of the episode."

So, the tracks weren't covering up jokes that were real stinkers, but actually aligned with places of genuine humor and mirth.

Also, in an article for NBC, Bill Kelly, one of the researchers from Dartmouth involved in the study, notes that sometimes "we're much more likely to laugh at something funny in the presence of other people."

So, hearing someone else lose it over a joke can decrease our inner awkward turtle and increase our ability to cut loose and just laugh.

And that's about as much science as I'm going to do for this episode.

So, even though the laugh track has a bad rap, it's still sticking around because it helps us to loosen up when we're watching a show, even though it's gotten a reputation as a background noise controlled by big studios to force us to laugh at their stinker shows.