Emmy-winning laugh-track expert Caroll Pratt dies

LOS ANGELES - Carroll Pratt, an Emmy-winning sound engineer who also worked with the inventor of the laugh track and spent decades adding laughter and other effects to a variety of shows, has died. He was 89.

Pratt died of natural causes Thursday at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital in Santa Rosa, Calif., north of San Francisco, said his son, Scott Ouchida-Pratt.

Pratt was working as a re-recording mixer at MGM in the early 1950s when he was approached by Charles Rolland Douglass, who invented the Laff Box, which was basically a series of audiotape loops.

They were joined by Pratt's brother, John, as the use of laugh tracks took off in TV comedies and other shows, first to fill in sounds and later to provide laughter in shows without an audience or augment the real audience's reaction.

The Pratts started their own business, trying to make their contributions hard to spot amid pressure to give bigger laughs.

"One thing I feel strongly about is that if you go to a movie or watch a TV show where the musical composer has done his job, you never realize the music is playing. It's all lending itself to the effect that the art form should have," Pratt said in the 2004 book "Creating Television" by Robert Kubey. "If a laugh track is well laid in, I feel that the best compliment is someone coming to me and saying that the show got through without a laugh track."

Carroll Holmes Pratt was born April 19, 1921, in Hollywood. During World War II, his B-24 bomber was shot down over Austria with Pratt and the other crew members parachuting to land. Pratt was held prisoner for nearly two years before escaping from a German camp in 1945.

After the war, Pratt returned to MGM and worked his way up the ranks. Then came television and his role with what he called "the audience reaction machine." Douglass' machine ultimately featured hundreds of human sounds that could be used by a sound operator.

The machine Pratt and his brother used when they started their own company had "endless cassettes that loop around in a regular mounting, the same as a household audiocassette player," he said in "Creating Television." They built a library of sounds taping a variety of shows in different locations.

One tape contained shorter laughs and "there are about 30 to 35 different chuckles before we get around to the start again. We mix them to avoid the feeling of repetition. Hopefully you'll never hear the same laugh in a show twice."

Pratt shared six prime-time Emmy Awards for sound mixing, including for "The Grammy Awards" in 1989, "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" in 1987 and "Motown Returns to the Apollo" in 1985.