I Love Lucy revolutionized television in a number of ways, but one of its more controversial claims to fame is being the first TV show filmed in front of a live studio audience.
Technically, everything in television’s early days was filmed before a live audience because it was a lot less Reacher and more Hamilton. They were essentially recorded plays, complete with audiences, beamed live into viewers’ homes. When Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz crafted their series, they decided to do it like the movies in a lot of ways but stuck with the live audience, combining “the strengths of stage plays (audience interaction, stronger comic writing, letting the actors feed off of the audience’s energy) and movies (the ability to choose camera angles, cut between points of view and use the best takes),” according to The AV Club.
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It’s a good thing, too. Can you imagine Lucy without the audience reaction? Just a screaming woman pinned down in her otherwise silent kitchen by a neverending loaf of bread? That’s not a sitcom. That’s a literal nightmare.
Of course, taping the same show week after week is bound to attract some regulars, so you can pick out a lot of the same, distinctive laughs in each episode. In fact, Arnaz claimed he recognized the laughter of people he knew, including assistant director Jim Paisley, who was so close to the action that “not only did the audience microphone pick up his laughter, our dialogue mic picked up his laugh,” he told David Letterman in 1983. (Arnaz himself can also often be heard off to the side, laughing at his wife’s antics. That’s love right there.)
The most distinguishable, however, was his ex-mother-in-law, Dede Ball. As he told Letterman, “You couldn’t miss her laugh.” In fact, it’s been rumored that she’s the woman who often exclaims “Uh-oh!” when Lucy is getting into on-screen trouble. Ball refuted the rumor in 1986, but she was never super reliable in interviews and had just been asked about using canned laughter, an accusation that eternally offended her, so she was in denial mode.
She may have been so affronted by the idea that her show used a laugh track because, according to Arnaz, when CBS came around to the idea, they used recordings of her audience. “Some of our laughter I hear on some other shows,” he told Letterman. “On all the shows. They lift them up.”
That means, in a way, Dede Ball has become more famous even than her legendary daughter. Ask the kids these days who Lucille Ball is, and at best, they might vaguely recall a rubber-faced redhead. Unfortunately, they’ve all seen The Big Bang Theory — and we all know what a nightmare that would be without the laugh track.
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