In an interview, Ben Glenn II, a television historian talks about canned laughter. Fascinating read. I’d heard of the ‘Laff Box’, never read a comprehensive account of it.

How did canned laughter come about?

The concept actually goes back at least five hundred years. History tells us that there were audience “plants” in the crowds at Shakespearean performances in the 16th century. They spurred on audience reactions, including laughter and cheering—as well as jeers.

How about more recently?

Canned laughter was used to a certain degree in radio, but its first TV appearance was in 1950, on a rather obscure NBC situation comedy, The Hank McCune Show. Remarkably, there are a couple of clips from the show on YouTube.

(I’ve previously ranted about canned laughter in comedy shows.)

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of goviral. All opinions are 100% mine.

Television in the UK is a curious beast to understand. I think that compared to any country across the entire world, the British television scene is the most insulated from American television. TV in UK is overwhelmingly dominated by UK-based broadcasters such as BBC (of course), Channel 4, ITV, Sky, and others. It’s not as if American content is not available at all – some is surely available, but often relegated to non-prime timeslots, aired after significant delays, or aired on smaller channels run by these networks. We get more American or American-corporation owned TV content in India than here, while British TV content is not available at all (except for BBC World).

Even in the UK, a lot of viewership is limited to the flagship channels of the main broadcasters, leaving quirky but promising programmes to languish in smaller channels. YouTube has offered a medium for a lot of creative people to release and reach a wide audience in ways that never would’ve been possible with normal channels. YouTube videos have to be short, and can appeal to a specific audience.

Sony Ericsson sponsored ‘Pocket TV’ in one such show with ‘webisodes’ covering music and entertainment industry. The show is hosted by Matt Edmondson and has had quite a few stars on it such as Jude Law and Forest Whitaker (discussing Repo Men, in the video embedded above), and a lot of other British TV, music, film stars. The campaign’s objective is to promote watching videos on mobile devices (which is where the Sony Ericsson angle comes in). The medium of broadcasting via YouTube is a good match because the episodes are short, and YouTube videos can be viewed on most smartphones. The show itself is something that I would say wouldn’t be able to survive in on normal TV channels because of its quirkiness but it can find a niche online. Pocket TV is a apt title for this show!

This is where I find sponsored post regulations irritating me – I wanted to link to the YouTube channel of the show, and point out a few videos that I really liked because of the technical aspects involved with editing them are brilliant. Unfortunately, the let’s-shoot-ourselves-in-the-foot sponsored post regulations don’t allow me to link to anything other than the ‘specified’ content (the Repo Men) interview in this case. So if you want to check out there channel, click on the embedded video once it has started playing to access the other videos. It’s the most beautifully designed YouTube channel page I’ve ever seen, and a lot of older videos are really slickly edited.