99% Invisible - 305- The Laff Box

Episode Date: May 2, 2018

For nearly five decades, the laugh track was ubiquitous on television sitcoms, but in the early 2000s, it began to disappear. What happened? How did we get from the raucous canned laughter of the Beverly Hillbillies to the silent, sly “joke every 20 seconds” of 30 Rock? The curious story of the laugh track starts with one man who created the laugh track as a homemade piece of technology that took over the sound of television and then fell out of fashion with the rise of a more modern sense of humor. What happened to the laugh track is one of the cultural mysteries that are being explored on Slate’s new monthly podcast:  Decoder Ring with Willa Paskin The Laff Box Plus, Roman talks to The West Wing Weekly co-host Joshua Malina about his time acting on Sports Night, which was a turning point in the history of the television laugh track. Learn more and subscribe to Decoder Ring Subscribe to The West Wing Weekly

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. For nearly five decades, the Laft Track was ubiquitous on television setcams, but in the early 2000s, it began to disappear. What happened? How did we get from the Rockas-Candle Laughter of the Beverly Hillbillies to these silent, sly, joke every 20 seconds of 30 Rock? The curious story of the Laft Track starts with one man who created the Laft-Track as a homemade piece of technology that took over the sound of television, and then fell out of fashion with the rise of a more modern sense of humor. What happened to the Laft-Track is just one of the cultural mysteries that are being explored

on Slate's new monthly podcast, Decoder Ring. Here presenting the first episode of Decoder Ring, called the Lafbox, is host Willa Pascon. When Paul Iverson was eight years old, he would come home from school, turn on the TV, and watch the Pink Panther show. It was 1982, and Paul was watching the show in syndication on WGN Chicago. Some channels aired versions of the laugh track and some aired versions without. I always watched the ones that had the laughter because it was, I guess, as a child it was

communal to me. I said, oh, there's people watching with me and they sound like adults, they don't sound like children. He loved the show so much that he would tape it, but he didn't have a VCR. So he would use a tape recorder, one that only captured the sound, even though the Pink Panther show has very little dialogue. What even listening to, that's mostly what the Pink Panther sounds like. What I was doing was allowing myself to hear the laughs rather than watch the show visually

like watching a show with your eyes closed. And I basically started studying this. So who are these people laughing? Why are they laughing in the same order as they did last time? Paul's early encounters with the Pink Panther fostered a lifelong interest in laugh tracks. Paul lives in LA and works as an account manager at an insurance company, but he's a passionate laugh track hobbyist.

Paul taught himself everything about laugh tracks, how they're made, who made them, the difference between them, even how to make them for himself. The monkeys is a great show to think of because they killed the left track halfway through the second season. One of my goals in life is to re add the left track and not just let it but try to add it as it was during that season, using those same laughs. It's really a very

strange obsession because there's so few people you can tell it to but I love recreating them. I love isolating these clips and putting them on anything I possibly can. One of the shows that Paul tinkered around with is the ABC sitcom Modern Family. It doesn't have a laugh track so Paul gave it one. I just never had a teacher not like me before. Well I'm the stavis. Please she's a gym teacher. She's to teaching what Dr. Sus is to medicine. I don't think she didn't like you.

Modern family premiered in 2009, but if it had arrived just five years earlier, it would have sounded something like that. From the 1950s to the early 2000s, sitcoms had Laftracks period. And then, when Laftrack free shows like arrested development and the American version of the office made its network TV, they mostly disappeared. Most sitcoms today don't have one, except for a few big hits, like the Big Bang Theory and reboots like Roseanne. When we talk about Laftracks now, it's mostly to make jokes about them. But when Paul was growing up and every show had a Laftrack, people didn't talk about them very much.

They were kind of a secret. So a few people knew about it or discussed it. Everybody hears that everybody is aware of it. Why won't anybody talk about it? Today, we're going to talk about it. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Growing up, I never thought much about the Laftrack one way or another. They were just always there.

But as a TV critic, I've watched Laftrack's become contentious and deeply uncool. It's always fascinated me that something we barely noticed for so long, something that we maybe even kind of liked, could become so annoying to so many people so quickly. What changed? Why did they exist in the first place? Did we just realize they were really lame? And if so, what took us so long? From Slate Magazine, this is Dakota Rin, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.

I'm Slate's TV critic, Willa Pascon, and every month I'll take a cultural object, idea, or habit, and try to figure out where it comes from, what it means, and why it matters. Today, what happened to the Laft Track? Imagine it's the 1950s, you've just gotten your very first television set. It weighs a ton and it's a size with a bureau, with wood paneling and a couple of dials on the side. You set it up in the living room and you call them the whole family and you turn it on. It's too late now, but ladies and gentlemen, I must tell you.

It's the Jack Benny program. Originally a hit radio show, the series starred Benny, a one-time Vaudeville performer and comedian as a version of himself, a radio star. And now that show from the radio, it's on your television, and even though you've heard it before, you've never seen anything like it. Before, when you watched a performance, it was in public with an audience, and now it's happening in your house. Think about how strange, how new that must have been, and then listen. You hear it? Something recognizable, something reassuring,

something that tells you what you're watching. Laughter. It was my sponsor who didn't have the nerve. Yeah. That's how most early TV comedies were recorded in front of a live audience, oftentimes in studios in New York. By the early 50s, as the TV industry moved away from New York and into Hollywood, executives wanted to move away from this traditional approach of broadcasting what

amounted to live stage shows. They wanted to shoot comedies on film, comedies that weren't live, but they still sounded live. The solution to this problem? The laugh track, and the person who came up with the solution? Charles Douglas. Charlie. Douglas was a mechanical engineer who had worked on radar for the Navy in World War II, so he knew his way around audio and electronics. In 1950, the Hank and McEwan show, a mostly forgotten series from NBC, had used a rudimentary laugh track.

But by 1953, Douglas had developed a better way to insert a laugh into a show. If you've ever watched an old sitcom, you've almost certainly heard his work. Now we lift up the dryers and see how their hair turned out. I asked Ron Simon, curator of television and radio at the Paley Center, formerly the Museum of Television Radio, what he knew. Charlie Douglas took the concept of just adding laughter, probably from a transcription

disc, to create a machine that could do it. And he created this little box using laughter from Marcel Marceau and from Red Skeleton from the silent sequences and create a tape loop that could then be injected into film comedy to make it a live experience. Douglass then poured over these laughs at his kitchen table night after night. He spliced them into analog tape reels that could be played on a patented device Douglas had built himself out of household appliances, organ parts, and vacuum tubes. The device was about three feet tall, the shape of a filing cabinet, very heavy, and had slots for 32 reels which could hold 10 laughs each. It was officially named the audience response duplicator, but it became known as the laughbox, and that's laugh, spelled in the goofy 50 style, L-A-F-F.

The laughbox is this weird machine that's closer to, we'll say, steepunk, that it is to modern electronic technology. As I can add a machine, we just press these dials and laughter would happen. Eventually, it would evolve into more of a typewriter thing where you would punch keys. The laughbox could chuckle.

It could laugh with side relief. It even had a reel controlled by the foot pedal that was just hitters. Tiny little one person laughs. At its most sophisticated, the box had 320 laughs. It could play one laugh at a time by pressing one key, or by pressing multiple keys together, it could play a bunch of laughs at once. So if he thought something was remotely funny, let's have this guy laugh right here.

And he just had that going. And maybe he'd come back and watch it. So you know, that wasn't quite as funny as the producer's going to want it. So maybe he would add a second sound like this. And then he would add it all together and mix it together so you hear the full product. Three separate clips overlapped. What would happen was the producer or the director would come back and see his work and say, you know what, that could use a much louder laugh.

Can you give it a louder go-fall? And he and say, you know what, that could use a much louder laugh. Can you give it a louder go-fall? And he'd say, all right, sure. So he'd throw something in just like that. Because laugh boxes were patented and handmade by Douglas, it wasn't like just anyone can make or use one. They're only a handful of working models at a time, and he basically had a monopoly on the process. By the 1960s, almost all sitcoms were single-camera shows, filmed with that in the audience, and tricked

out with a raucous Charlie Douglas laugh track. The boxes supply laughter for tens of thousands of episodes of television. Tens of thousands, maybe even more. Everything from the monsters bewitched the Beverly Hillbilly's Gilligan's Island to marry Tyler Moore and sheers. For decades, their sound was ubiquitous, but Douglass didn producers want to talk about and really actually talk about, you know, how the last sausage was actually made. Douglas hardly ever gave interviews or spoke about his work.

A 1966 piece from TV Guide titled The Hollywood Sphinx and His Laugh Box, in which the Sphinx is Douglas, describes the mystery surrounding the man and his device. The author wrote, If the laugh box should start acting strangely, the laugh boys wheel it into the men's room, locking the door behind them so no one can peek. I mentioned the name Charlie Douglas, and it's like Kosa Nostra. Everybody starts whispering.

It's the most taboo topic in TV. I wanna say here that every knock on the laugh track that you've ever heard, that it's fake, that it's corny, that it's cheating, that it's not funny, that it thinks audiences are dumb, people have been saying since the beginning, and that's part of the reason for Douglas's silence. But listening to Douglas's laughs, hearing Paul try to recreate them, it changed how I thought about them. I've always prided myself on being open-minded about the laugh track. A funny show was a funny show, with or without one.

But even so, I always thought of them as automated, mechanical. But they aren't really that at all. They're a craft. Charlie Douglas played his laugh box like it was an instrument, literally. A lot of people think it was just a bunch of laughs thrown into a tape machine and someone's pushing the button. It was an art. I mean, he took it very seriously. Here's one of Charlie's laughs. It was used in the late 60s and 70s, including in the pilot for Mash. You hear the laughter telling off at the end? I love that. It tells a story in a single laugh. There's a joke, but one guy in the audience, he doesn't get it right away.

He's a split second late, and then he laughs a little bit longer. Here, listen to it again. Charlie Douglas was in just a sound engineer. He was a psychologist. The rap on the Laftrak is that it's fake laughter from a fake audience, but that's not quite right. The Laftrak doesn't just represent a bogus audience. It represents an audience of one of Charlie Douglas.

He definitely goose laughs at producers' instructions, but who a large extent he and the people who worked for him followed their guts. It's incredible that one man's taste and sense of humor were so important in pacing an entire type of television comedy. But it's true. So how did the Laft track drive an era of TV come to an end? How did the Laft Track go from being a tittering companion to an annoyance? To answer that, I think we need to think about the Laft Track as not just a habit or an

object, but an idea, an idea about why we laugh. I'm going to get to another idea about Laft or later on, but this first one, I think it makes the Laft Track of the 50s and 60s make a lot more sense. Here, I want you to listen to something. Something that people once thought was really funny. That menacing sequence is from the OK Laughing Record. OK, OK-E-H is the name of the record label that released it in 1922. It was recorded a few years earlier in Germany, and it's the sound of a cornette being interrupted by a hysterically laughing woman who was joined by a hysterically laughing man. That's it.

It goes on for two and a half minutes. Two and a half creepy, creepy minutes. But in 1922, people thought it was hilarious. The OK Laughing Record was a huge novelty hit. There's speculation it sold over a million copies. It spawned an entire many genre of novelty laughing records. The Laft Track, it's a version of the OK Laughing Record. It's trying to make you laugh just by listening to other people laugh. What's funny must be the laughter because it's not the joke.

There is no joke. But this particular approach to humor, it's not that popular right now. To find someone to defend it, I had to talk to one of Paul's friends. Ben Glenn, he's an art historian by training, but he's also a devoted Laft Track enthusiast. He and Paul are in the same Charlie Douglas Facebook group. If you think about a show like that that relies heavily on the laugh track, like, be wist for the monsters. If you didn't have it, it just wouldn't be funny.

Well, it might, but is that mean that shows just actually bad? And it was using like this crutch this... Well, yes, yes, partly, but, but somebody getting a pie in the face and then their silence is not funny, right? Somebody getting a pie in the face with a huge laugh, that's funny. I found this. That does a tree falling in the forest make a sound, Zen Cohen of sitcom laughter, genuinely perplexing. Is a pie in the face funny if no one laughs? Is an episode of Friends Funny If No One Laughs? That's what I wondered after coming across this video, posted on YouTube by the user Espoz, a friend without a laugh track. You can hear what the rhythm of the show is supposed to be, how the pacing depends upon

their being laughter. Without it, friends sound weird and unnatural. If there's no audience laughter, it suddenly star how odd it is that the characters aren't trying to make each other laugh. Friends needs its laughs to be funny, even if some of them are fake. The transition away from the Laptop started slowly. In the 70s, with Norman Lear sitcoms like All in the Family, comedy started to be taped in front of a live studio audience again.

The audience's laughs would be smoothed out, edited, or boosted. This is a process called sweetening, which Douglas had done a lot of and still happens all the time. But the aim, already, was that the laughs should sound more realistic. In the 80s and 90s, some shows, like The Wonder Years, The Larry Sanders Show, and The Days and Nights of Mollie Dodd started to experiment with dropping the laugh track, but TV's biggest hits, shows like cheers, sign felt, and friends still had them. By the late 90s, with the rise of cable and un-laft-tracked animated series like The Simpsons,

even the network started contemplating making different kinds of comedies, setting up a collision between the old idea about comedy and the typical way of doing things and a new idea about comedy and a new way of shooting a TV show. Caught in that collision, Aaron Sorkin's Sports Night. You're watching Sports Night on CSC, so come on back. We're out, two and a half minutes back. In 1997, Sorkin sold Sports Night his first TV show to ABC. It was a comedy set behind the scenes of an ESPN style sports network. Sorkin and the director, Tommy Schlame, wanted to shoot it like a single camera show. The set had four walls, the camera moved, and they wanted to shoot it without a laugh track.

ABC, not so much. They wanted to do something different, but not that different. Here's Schlamey. The economics of television and certainly half-hour television was so massive for shows that had had traditional life tracks that they were really very nervous about giving that up completely. What did you feel like the life track meant about your show? Here's what it is, the sort of base tone of a situational comedy is the laugh track. I think we're familiar with it. I think it sort of resonates in a

certain way. But I think it is kind of establishing a conceptual idea about a show that is saying it's not real. This is a theatrical presentation. I'm there with this group of people. We're all laughing. It's fun. That was not the idea of the way I think Aaron wrote or what I think Sports Night was about. Here's a clip of the Laftrak from the Sports Night pilot. Yeah, but the point I'm making is that I can't, who is this? I'm Jeremy Goodwin. Oh, you're here for the associate producer job. Yes, and let me just say that it is important. It was one of the first shows, whereas a viewer, I could really feel that the Laftrack was holding the show back. Sports night is fast.

It doesn't want to pause to wait for the audience's laughter. So the laughs have to be shoehorned into the rare breaks in Sorkin's dense dialogue, where they sound even faker than usual. Dispatches from a whole other sensibility. What you can hear starting to happen with sports night is a laugh track changing from background noise into an impediment. It's actively keeping Sports Night from being as funny and fast, from being as good as it could be. After its first few episodes, Sports Night stopped being taped in front of an audience at all, and the laughter got even fainter. Here's a clip from an

episode at the end of season one. Yes. Yes. You're breaking up now. Hello. You're breaking up. Now you're not there at all. There's nobody there at all. Yet I'm still talking. All right. For a second season, ABC let the show drop the Laftrak entirely, but it was canceled at the end of that season

anyway in 2000, just ever so slightly ahead of its time. The Laftrak-free British version of the office premiered in 2001. In 2003, arrested development started airing on Fox. In 2005, the American adaptation of the office started airing on NBC, the first huge hit without a Laft Track. That same year, everybody loves Raymond won the Emmy for Best Comedy. That's the last time a sitcom with a Laft Track has done so.

The end of the La for Best Comedy. That's the last time a sitcom with a laugh track has done so. The end of the laugh track era. Oh! So what changed? I wanna talk about another theory about laughter. That's different from the pie in the face theory I mentioned earlier. In this theory, laughter isn't a fundamentally social activity. Something that we do just because everyone else is doing it. It's something deeply, wonderfully individual and idiosyncratic, a reaction to the quality of the joke itself.

Representing this point of view is the TV writer Andy Sikunda. Andy's now a writer on the current ABC sitcom The Goldbergs, which doesn't have a laugh track, but his first show, the 2004 UPN sitcom Love Incorporated, about modern day matchmakers, did. But that's not fair, I have a dream too. What's your dream? To have $10,000 more. I'm talking about $10,000 to help improve the human condition. Well, $10,000 will help improve this human condition very much.

Before working on Love Incorporated, Andy had been a writer for Conan and a teacher and performer at the Improv Comedy Power powerhouse upright citizens for Gade. I was an alternative comedy snob and coming out of the New York scene already was like every show with a laugh track other than Seinfeld is you know, Passe, a dinosaur. But Andy didn't have the clout to keep love incorporated from having a laugh track. The show was performed in front of a studio audience and they had some real laughs, but then a sound editor came in to sweeten it, boosting and manipulating all of them. So the real laughs were replaced by a laugh track. But

Andy didn't want to use that laugh track in the typical way. So I guess my take was well since we're doing this anyway, why don't we just decide what's funny? To me I was like, if well it's going to be this creation, this false thing. Why go halfway? Just make the whole thing a fiction. I want to train the audience that's watching at home. It's not really paying that much attention anyway in my head. In other words, any wanted to rig the Laftrack to reflect what was really funny.

He understood how the Laftrack is supposed to work, that is supposed to make people laugh at what other people are laughing at. But he wanted to retrofit it to account for the second theory of laughter, to tell audiences hey, some jokes are just funnier than others and you should laugh at those. Andy didn't succeed, his boss wouldn't have it. But even so you can see, he may be skeptical of the laughter of the crowd, but he believes in the objective quality of the joke. You may be able to get a big laugh out of an audience and be not that great a comic. I mean a lot of comics would argue, well if you get to get the laugh, then you are a great

comic. It's great because I'm a snob. And he may be a snob, but his perspective has become widespread. This is how lots of people think about comedy now. Me included. Some jokes just are better than others, and you can't tell simply based on what got the biggest laugh, especially when that laugh comes from a laugh track. For decades, TV was ruled by this idea that laughter is socially contingent, and then that idea was surpassed by this other idea, that laughter is idiosyncratic and individual. But this was a big transition. For some viewers, the laugh track didn't just stop encouraging

laughter, it started inhibiting it. The laugh track broke. Today, shows with laugh tracks have been almost entirely cut out of the quadcopo conversation, but they still have their modern day defenders and uses, especially in the revivals of beloved shows that had laugh tracks, like Will & Grace. Netflix's 2017 reboot of Norman Lear's One Day at a Time, a show about a divorced Cuban-American veteran with PTSD, raising her son and teenage daughter while living with her mother is great. It's smart, it's charming, it's queer, and it has a laugh track too. She has to have a keen sis.

How else will we know the day that our little girl becomes a woman? You missed it. I was 12. I was in gym and ironically happened in first period. So just so you know, so this is this is a podcast we're doing about the Laft track. It's I'm wanting to talk to you guys because you do a great show that has Laft track. It doesn't have a Laft track. It's actually a live audience. I knew you're gonna say that, but we're gonna talk about all that in detail.

That's Gloria Calderon-Kellet and Mike Royce, the showrunners of one day at a time. They're right. Their show is filmed in front of a live audience, as was the original. Mike and Gloria say their sound editor cuts down on the a's and the more excessive whoops for Rita Marano and even trims down some laughs. But they say there's no sweetening in their show. When I said it was a laugh track, like, why does that bother you so much?

Some people just don't like to hear other people laughing because it feels like they're being told what to do. But part of that comes from, I think, feeling like the laughter is somehow fakedly added on. Mike is right. That is how some people feel about the laugh track. That it's a false advertisement trying to sell you a bad joke as though it's a good one. And sometimes that is what the laugh track is.

So I asked why it was worth risking that kind of reaction. For me it's about a shared experience. So I feel like it's an opportunity to experience a play in the comfort of your home, but you're experiencing it as though you are a part of a community. We want them to experience the emotions, audibly. You know, like there is something about that, that crying too, by the way. For Gloria and Mike, the Laftrak is a reminder that other people are there, watching with you, even when you're all alone, just like it has been from the very beginning.

I want to go back to that scene from earlier, when you turned on the TV for the first time and saw the Jack Benny program, and it was so new and strange. When you heard the audience laughing, it was a cue that you should laugh to. Yes, but also it was a sign, a sign that you weren't watching alone. The laugh track was trying to bridge the bizarre new distance between the audience and the performers, between the audience and other members of the audience. The thing you have to remember, and this is so different than now, that the Laptrack was trying to overcome a defect of television, which is that unlike Vaudeville in the movies,

you watched it all by yourself. Now that defect, that you don't have to go anywhere, or interact with anyone while you watch it, that's one of TV's biggest selling points. And the Laptrack helped us to get to that point. For a long time, the Laftrak seemed permanent, but it was really more like training wheels, something that taught us this new skill of watching and laughing in solitude. It might have stuck around way too long, but it did its job really well. By the late 90s and early aughts, when the numbers of shows on cable started to skyrocket

and the TV audience began to fragment, we were totally ready to move from one theory of laughter to another, to embrace the idea of ourselves as individuals with idiosyncratic comedic taste, who did not need or even want the laugh track's lame chortle of approval to know what was funny. These days, it's the laugh track that seems weird and vestigial, a sound from another time, and less were specifically after the theatrical, communal, throwback experience of a show like one day at a time. The laugh track has always been a tool, and nearly 70 years after it was invented, there's

nothing to fix. Watching TV alone isn't the weird activity, watching together is. As multi-camera comedies with laugh tracks have faded out, single-camera comedies without laughs have only gotten more and more adventurous, leading to a whole upheaval in what constitutes a comedy, full stop. Many of the busiest, most well-regarded comedies, like Atlanta and Girls and Transparent, are more funny adjacent than laugh out loud funny. They aren't after that big, big laugh. Making

people laugh is really, really hard. One shortcut from decades ago was to fake that laughter. A more modern fix is not to worry about whether audiences are laughing at all. My littlest baggage would probably be my ABS. And my medium baggage would be that I truly don't love my grandmother. Like, you don't love her at all. Mm-hmm. Just know what your biggest baggage be. Got a my virgin? Obviously. Even if they're not laughing, audiences are finding

makeshift ways to watch communally. If you're looking for the present day technological equivalent of the laugh track, look at social media. Sitting on your couch, reading Twitter while you watch Atlanta or a football game or the Bachelor, those tweets are a signal about what's good and what's interesting. Sometimes, there's just a show's best jokes, tweeted verbatim. Often those tweets will make you laugh. They'll definitely keep you from feeling like you're watching all alone.

Learning the history of the Laftrac, thinking about it as a way to foster a feeling up to Gatherness, it really made me wonder. Is solo binging with headphones on, while the person in the very same room is you, watches something else, really better than gathering around one of three channels, politely putting up with canned laughter? And one of these experiences, you definitely get to decide what's funny for yourself, but you really are doing it all alone. I think this is part of what drives Laftrack aficionata as like Paul Iverson. When he tinkers with Laftracks and adds them back into old episodes of the Pink Panther or the

Monkeys, he's recapturing the spirit of a different time, a different way of watching television. When Laftr was an ajudgment, but a companion. When I asked Paul what his favorite Charlie Douglas laugh was, he had one of course. He got right to the heart of it. It was basically a deep man's laugh. That was used sparingly, and then it started to get used more regularly, and it sounds like this. When we heard that, my sister would say there's your friend. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ You've been listening to De Coderring, hosted by Willa Pasquim. De Coderring is a brand new podcast from Slate. It was produced and edited by Benjamin Frisch.

You can find out more about the show at Slate.com slash De Coderring. Or just go subscribe to it wherever you get your podcasts. It's good. You're gonna like it. One of the shows in radio- Topia is the West Wing Weekly, and the co-host of that show is Joshua Malina, who starred in the show Sports Night, one of my favorite television shows of all time, and is cited as the tipping point moment of the Laptop. So I asked him what it was like to act in TV show that was slowly turning down the Laptop over the course of the series. We have that conversation after this. Joshua Malina is the co-host of Radio Topia's The West Wing Weekly podcast with Recikase Herway.

Joshua is also an actor on the side. He recently wrapped up a seven-year run on scandal. He was also on the West Wing, but he got his big break in television as Jeremy Goodwin on another erensor creation, Sports Night. Sports Night was a strange and beautiful half-hour comedy with strong, dramatic elements, and the rapid fire dialogue that people would embrace more fully on the West Wing. But as was mentioned in the documentary you just heard, Sports Night marked the beginning of the end for the Laft track. I asked Joshua if he was aware of that dynamic at the time. It was always my understanding that Aaron objected strenuously to the inclusion of a Laft track on Sports Night,

and for that matter, to the inclusion of a live audience in the studio as we filmed what was essentially a single camera comedy, so it was kind of being forced into a hybrid of which Aaron did not approve. And did you feel the tension of it being either a fish nor a foul when you were acting in it? Yes, I think as a performer and as somebody coming from a theater background and perhaps somebody who's a little bit of an innate ham. It is hard to ignore the presence of 90 people in a room where you're making a show, hopefully for millions of people to watch at home.

There is something different between a performance for camera and a live performance. And so while the priority ought to be the home viewing audience, I found it difficult not to play to the people who are in the room with me. Well, I'm very happy with my performance in the pilot. It's large. It's possible one can detect my playing to the live audience when perhaps I should have toned it down a little bit. But if you're asking me for genuinely sophisticated analyses and I sense that you are! You've got to give me some time of these 20 minutes.

As the Laft Track itself was slowly muted, I think maybe my performance got a little bit smaller, a little more finely realized. So I think I need to back up a little bit to understand. So there is a live audience for the first season or what was the setup actually? There was a live audience for I think as long as there was a laugh track. And when Tommy Schlame and Aaron Sorkin finally outwitted ABC, simply by dialing it down a bit, episode by episode until it was gone.

So they never, they never won the explicit argument about a laugh track. ABC never said fine, get rid of the laugh track. They just got rid of it so slowly. You know, it's that thing, I guess, where you boil a frog. And it was, you know, de facto, they had gotten rid of the laugh track by the time ABC seemed to notice. So my memory is that that was somewhere around episode seven or eight. And having disposed of the laugh track, we disposed of the live audience.

It was already a weird situation to have the audience there when we were moving around trying to make our single camera comedy. And so there really was no existential point to the live audience once the Laft track was removed. It was one of those where instances where I think that a lot of us who grew up on television, the Laft Track was part of sitcoms and this was a very different sitcom. Did you feel the sense of

this tension as an audience member as well as a person crafting this thing? Yes, I'm not a big fan of Laft Track's altogether. Somehow in the golden age of TV, if the shows in black and white and feels like a theater piece anyway, like the honeymooners looks like they're putting on a play, it kind of works and has sort of an old school resonance for me. Certainly for what we were doing, which was creating a piece that included elements of comedy and drama, it just felt odd. It felt weird as we were making it. And when I watched it, that sweetened, super artificial laugh track, I think, does not elevate the show. And so over the course of the first season, while the Laftruck was being dialed down, surreptitiously, did you intuitively know to change your

performance slightly? Was that communicated to you in some way or not? I don't think it was made explicit. I think I just settled into the natural rhythm of acting for the camera. I think the best piece of advice I got as a young actor, learning how to act on film, was always remembered for the camera. I think the best piece of advice I got as a young actor, learning how to act on film, was always remembered that the camera can read your mind. And that's a very different piece of advice from, you know, make sure your performance reaches

the person in the last row of the balcony. And so there are baked in inherent differences between a live performance and a performance for camera. So once the audience was actually gone, I think I just settled into, okay, we're making a TV show. And you know, that camera is going to get in really close when it needs to. And I can just sort of let go of the idea of trying to project anything. I could just sort of let go of the idea of trying to project anything. So what do you think of sports night being this pivotal moment in Laft Track history? The situation with the Laft Track and ABC versus Aaron and Tommy reflected a very significant misunderstanding on the network's part of what the show was and

So I think it's just one off-shoot of they're not quite knowing what they had or what to do with sports night And I think we're very used to seeing single camera comedies and we're used to seeing Television shows that one might have difficulty classifying as a comedy or a drama. I don't know why this was such a, you know, why things are so binary, you know, 20 years ago. Now we're a little bit more sophisticated as an audience and we understand that much like life TV shows can have moments of drama and moments of comedy. But I think at the time, ABC didn't quite know how to handle what Aaron and Tommy were giving them. Right.

The, the, the, the, the left track was reflection of that tension. Like a lot of things, the, the first guy through the wall gets the bloodiest. Right. And then we've all benefited from that fight because of West Wing and 30 Rock and all these things that I think you could point to this moment and go, the Piric Victory of Sports Night made it so that all this other great TV happened as well. You have to understand, I think of Sports Night as this complete success. Like I love it so much. I appreciate that.

So this strange little object, it fought a battle that really changed a lot of television that we admire today. I agree with you. It feels like a platitude to say that anything was before its time, or that's why we didn't do better because we were before our time. But I think it's actually an apt phrase here, and I do think Aaron Sorkin and Tommy Schlame in terms of the material that Aaron was writing and the way that Tommy was filming it, that I think they were truly a little bit ahead of the curve, and it did ultimately take a little more time

for audiences to come around for this type of material. But I agree with you. Look, we did 45 episodes, we got a couple seasons, and I feel happy, and that I was part of it and proud of what we ultimately put out. Joshua Molina is the co-host of the West Wing Weekly, an addictive and rigorous discussion of the TV show The West Wing. Trust me, it's great, and the they've formed around the podcast is just like this warm embrace.

So proud to have them part of the radio-topia crew. 99% of visible is Avery Truffman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Shereefuse of Terran Mazza, composer Sean Riel, digital director Kirk Colessted senior editor, Delaney Hall, senior producer, Katie Mingle, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 K-A-L-W in San Francisco, and produced on Radio Roe. In beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. We are a part of radio-topia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative, nicest, smelling shows and all of podcasting.

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