Charlie Douglass

Inventor of canned laughter for television

Charles Rolland Douglass, sound engineer: born 1910; married 1941 Dorothy Dunn (two sons); died Templeton, California 8 April 2003.

The invention of canned laughter for television sitcoms such as The Jack Benny Show and I Love Lucy in the 1950s was welcomed by American producers but became an irritant to many viewers across the world who were not taken in by the fake giggles, cries, jeers, gasps, titters and guffaws. Charlie Douglass was the brains behind the "Laff Box", which was used to replace or enhance studio audiences. At the time, he was working as a technical director on live studio broadcasts for CBS television.

Born in Mexico to an American family who moved to Nevada when he was two, Douglass graduated in electrical engineering from the University of Nevada and joined CBS radio in Los Angeles as a sound engineer. While serving with the US Navy during the Second World War, he developed shipboard radar systems.

Returning to CBS, he saw the potential for recreating on television the hilarity heard in classic radio programmes – or at least smoothing over the gaps left by studio audiences. He spent hundreds of hours extracting laughter and other audience reactions from tapes he had recorded. The result was a machine that stood 28 inches high and looked like an organ, with a keyboard that enabled the operator to choose the style, sex and age of the laughter and a foot pedal to regulate the length of each reaction.

The American comedian Jackie Gleason, star of the sitcom The Honeymooners, quickly made clear his opposition to laughter tracks. "I'd hate to do something on our show that was a laugh on someone else's," he said.

On Douglass's retirement, his son Bob continued to run the family business, Northridge Electronics. In 1992, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences presented Douglass with a Lifetime Achievement Emmy.

His contraption is now reduced to a gadget the size of a laptop computer and capable of combining up to 40 audience sounds – as well as laughs that are deliberately un-American.

Anthony Hayward