Will You Laugh for Me, Please - Slavoj Zizek

On April 8, Charles R. Douglass, the inventor of "canned laughter" - the artificial laughter which accompanies comical moments in TV-series - died at 93 in Templeton, California. In the early 1950s, he developed the idea to enhance or substitute for live audience reaction on television; he then realized this idea in the guise of a keyboard machine - by pressing on different keys, it was possible to produce different kinds of laughter. First used for episodes of The Jack Benny Show and I Love Lucy, today, its modernized version is resent everywhere.

This overwhelming presence makes us blind for the unheard-of paradox of the "canned laughter": if we reflect a little bit upon this phenomenon, we can see that it undermines the natural presuppositions about the status of our innermost emotions. "Canned laughter" marks a true "return of the repressed," of an attitude we usually attribute to "primitives." Recall, in the traditional societies, the weird phenomenon of "weepers" (women hired to cry at funerals): a rich man can hire them to cry and mourn on his behalf while he can attend to a more lucrative business, like negotiating for the fortune of the deceased. This role can be played not only by another human being, but even by a machine, as in the case of the famous Tibetan "prayer wheels": I put a written prayer into a wheel and mechanically turn it (or, even better, link the wheel to window-mill which turns it), so that it prays for me - or, more precisely, I "objectively"pray through it, while my mind can be occupied with the dirtiest sexual thoughts...

To our surprise, Douglass' invention proved that the same "primitive" mechanism works also in our highly developed societies: when, in the evening, I come home, too exhausted to engage in a meaningful activity, I just press the TV button and watch Cheers, Friends, or another series; even if I do not laugh, but simply stare at the screen, tired after a hard days work, I nonetheless feel relieved after the show - it is as if the TV-screen was literally laughing at my place, instead of meÉ Before one gets used to "canned laughter," there is nonetheless usually a brief period of uneasiness: the first reaction to it is one of a shock, since it is difficult to accept that the machine out there can "laugh for me," there is something inherently obscene in this phenomenon. However, with time, one grows accustomed to it and the phenomenon is experienced as "natural.") This is what is so unsettling about the "canned laughter": my most intimate feelings can be radically externalized, I can literally "laugh and cry through another."

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