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network, and no one else will admit using it. In this one, no audience is required. The laughter emerges mys¬ teriously from a small box. It has been rumored that the box actually contains a trained hyena; but this is untrue, according to Charles Douglas, who invented it. Inside the box, Douglas insists, is a patented device capable of issuing anything from an intimate titter to a maniacal cackle. In addition, the box can be tuned up or down in voliune. In high gear it sounds like a thousand hungry men slurping minestrone. Douglas says his system is the best yet devised, but the networks seem to think that it’s spooky. There’s something uncanny, they feel, about laughter that comes out of a box. Many shows are not above manip¬ ulating the canned laughter on their sound tracks. When the prop audience doesn’t laugh heartily enough to suit the sponsor, an engineer in the sound booth turns up the volume. And when, on the other hand, the audience laughs so hard that the convulsion covers up a joke, they tone down the guffaw when synchronizing the laugh track to the finished film. Other shows make lavish use of “laugh loops”—reels of exposed sound tape—to take up the slack when the studio audience runs out of wind. Some shows apparently can’t decide what to do about canned laughter. The Stu Erwin Show, Dear Phoebe and Halls of Ivy are in this position. All have used laugh tracks, ditched them, then put them back in. For three years Stu Erwin produced his show weekly with no burbles of laughter on the sound track at all. Then along came a new sponsor who insisted on chortles. So for the next 26 weeks Stu and My Little Margie shared a rubberneck audience which often cracked its ribs laughing at one show and sat on its hands at the other. The temptation to swap the laughs was admittedly great but both pro¬ ducers swear they never did. When it comes to studio audiences, most producers lean toward those who produce laughter easily. The ex¬ act type of laughter isn’t too impor¬ tant—a simple bray will do—but highly specialized laughter is out. Desi Arnaz once dropped in on a filming of Make Room for Daddy, guffawed all the way through the first half and then was asked politely but firmly to go away. “That Cuban laugh of yours,” Danny Thomas complained, “is lousing up the sound track.” 11