the chuckle track and the obscure object of bourgeois desire

 

Adam doesn’t like the tv shows I watched when I was a kid, which are easy to find on the net. Especially the comedies. He can’t overlook or overhear the laugh track – an object that is also called a laughtrack and a laughtertrack. I’ve told him that some shows had live audiences – I have a dim memory that Norman Lear shows had live audiences – but Adam is a media wise child. He might be ten, but he’s a Parisian, no country bumpkin: “didn’t they put laugh and applause signs up for the audience”?

When I was Adam’s age, laughtracks were the rage. You couldn’t watch a comedy on network television without an accompanying laugh track. Watching them now, the laughtracks seem grotesque. They have aged badly. They make the exercise in nostalgia painful.

I’m not sure when the laugh tracks disappeared. After about 1980, I stopped watching network television. And even now, I watch network series, when I watch them, on Netflix. However, it would not surprise me if the laughtracks were junked around the time the Berlin wall fell, and throughout the world the old monopoly television companies were revamped, an event that had incalculable political consequences in so many places: Italy and the U.S., in particular.

The prehistory of orchestrated audience response reaches back to long before the Cold War – all the way back to the commencement of the entertainment industry in the 19^th century. In 1820, in the full swing of the reaction in France, a company was founded in Paris with the title: L’Assurance des Succès dramatiques. This agency, run by a former wigmaker named Porchon and his partner, a M. Sauton, would hire people to make a play or an opera a success. These claqueurs, as they were called,  would be sure to applaud, laugh loudly at the jokes, cry copiously at the sad parts, and in other ways make sure that a playwright’s opening night went well. Porchon would even loan money out to the writer – Alexander Dumas was one of his grateful clients.

Orchestrating audience response, before, had been an idiosyncratic matter of rivalry between aristocrats and the theeater troupes they patronized. Here, however, was a taste of capitalism – putting audience response on an industrial basis, the same kind of logic Marx and Engels celebrated in the Communist Manifesto:

“We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.”

And so it was with the entertainment industry.

We possess a ‘Memoir of a Claqueur” (1828) by one Louis Castel Robert. Robert’s story was of a reality that requires, for its full comprehension,  the intense cultivation of history – the history of France in the 1820s. Having inherited some money, and being of a tender, philosophical disposition, Robert, a young man in Paris, naturally pissed his funds away on drink, women, books and idleness. At the end of this process he confronted an unpleasantness that many of his type encountered, viz, debtors prison. In Sainte Pelagie, he had the good fortune to fall in with a man named Mouchival. Mouchival was a common looking fellow – yet Robert soon learned he was not so common after all. He was only in Sainte Pelagie due to a misunderstanding, practically - having co-signed on a loan for a friend – for Mouchival, like Porchon, was always a friend in deed – he found himself being charged with it. The man, however, was quite equal to the situation. As an entrepreneur in the claqueur field, he had simply written to a rich client who fancied himself a dramatist and expressed the need for some cash, for which he would, in the future, supply such services as may be required, yours truly. Thus, he was utterly confident of rescue. Rescue, in the form of francs, eventually did appear, but sent by an actress – through which he, in turn, rescued his promising young acquaintance, Robert. Which is how Robert found a place to fill in the world as a claqueur.

The claqueur was a character type in Paris, a figure out of Benjamin’s Arcades Project. The yellow gloves of the claqueur were particularly distinctive, and became a nickname for the claque crowd. – les gants jaunes. Robert writes that Mouchival gave him ‘elementary instructions in the science of cabales, and treated, as an experienced master, all the articles of the tactics proper to making plays succeed or fail.” Robert learned the “circumstances in which it was necessary to applaud or whistle, cry or laugh, be silent or scream, yawn or blow your nose.”

As Mouchival soon teaches the young man he has inexplicably taken under his wing, the surface work of the claqueur is just one link in the chain of profit. A more noticeable link is in the work of selling tickets. A certain number of tickets are allotted, free, to the claqueur. He can sell the superfluity himself. But the claqueur is not the only one to scalp tickets. Indeed, a good part of the theater world, from the actor to the usher to the critic, supplements their income on such sales.

The ontogenesis of the media world is here: content is rarely the profit item. It is the advertising, the peripherals – from concert t-shirts to influencer endorsements – that keeps the wheels going.

Interestingly, in the seventies, there was a show where the laugh track became, for the writers and creators, a controversial issue: MASH. This was a comedy about the Korean War, with obvious reference to the late Southeast Asia war. The producer, Larry Gelbert, did not want a laugh track. The network did: “Gotta have a laugh track. Because they always had had laugh tracks. This was so people would distinguish it from a drama. That was what they kept saying.” Gene Reynolds, the producer I believe, folded, but put in “a very discrete laugh track.”

Alan Wagner, president of programming for CBS in those days, was a proponent of laugh tracks: “The laugh track is overused – and I’m guilty of that as much as anybody. I’ve overused it badly, with some pretty core pilots, trying to goose the audience’s response. And the guy who invented that machine, I don’t think he did a very good job. There are some pretty raucous sounds in there – its hard to make it subtle. Hard to get a chuckle track out of that.”

Among tv comedy insiders, according to Saul Austerlitz’s book on the sitcom, Seinfeld, a hit comedy of the 90s, was positively ancient in its format compared to the Larry Sanders show. The latter dispensed for the most part  with the laugh track. It was the future. Austerlitz singles out Friends as “the last of the hugely successful traditional sitcoms, laugh track and all”.  It is not that the laugh track totally disappeared in the era of the Global War on Terror, but it was broadcast to an audience that no longer recognized this mechanized form of claqueur.

Perhaps the post-laugh track era, like the post-truth, post-post, post-Twitter, post-Facebook, post-democracy, post-reactionary, post post post Roger era, is a symptom of something. But being no pundit, I can’t bullshit a generalization here. Although I do know that exploiting the exploiters, the revolutionary takeover of the orchestration of audience response, is not on the table. Capitalism will find a way.