To modern audiences, the laugh track -- that cheesy pre-recorded laughter you hear in old sitcoms -- is a real head-shaker. But stranger than the existence of the laugh track is the fact that during its apex in the 60's, one man was responsible for it. Not only that, he built a special machine specifically for the dispensing of canned guffaws: the laff box.

The biggest reason the laugh track caught on was simply because historically, live audiences could not be relied upon to laugh at the correct moment. Other times, the audiences could laugh too long or too loud, sounding unnatural and forced or throwing off the performers' rhythms.

CBS sound engineer Charley Douglass noticed these, as he put it, "God-awful" responses, and took it upon himself to remedy the situation. If a joke did not get the desired chuckle, Douglass inserted additional laughter.

Douglass eventually spent countless hours extracting laughter, applause, and other reactions (right down to people moving around in their seats) from live soundtracks he had recorded (mainly from the dialogue-less The Red Skelton Show) and then placed the recorded sounds into a huge tape machine, dubbed the "laff box"...

The one-of-a-kind device was tightly secured with padlocks, stood more than two feet tall, and operated like an organ. Douglass used a keyboard to select the style, gender and age of the laugh as well as a foot pedal to time the length of the reaction. Inside the padlocked concoction was an array of recorded chuckles, yocks, and belly laughs; exactly 320 laughs on 32 tape loops, 10 to a loop. Each loop contained 10 individual audience laughs spliced end-to-end, whirling around simultaneously waiting to be cued up.

From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Charley Douglass had a monopoly on the expensive and painstaking "laff" business. By 1960, nearly every prime time show in America was "sweetened" by Douglass’ laff box.

Designer Rob Matthews claims that "reproducing Wikipedia in a dysfunctional physical form helps to question its use as an internet resource." To me, that doesn't quite seem to capture the tongue-in-cheek media Zen of the project. Judge for yourself: