You probably never heard of Charles “Charley” Douglass, 93, who died April 8. But you have heard of Charley’s invention.

Charley was a television technician whose 1953 invention, the “Laff Box,” was begrudgingly accepted by some and despised by others like me. Charley came up with the idea of dubbing in studio audience response when no audience initially existed or did not provide the wanted response – in other words, the laugh track.

Canned laughter was first recorded in 1949 at NBC Television in Hollywood during a Bing Crosby show. The laugh track itself was born when laughter from the Crosby show was spliced into NBC’s “Hank McCune Show.”

McCune wasn’t very funny, so producers added laughter. Viewers hated it and sent NBC an avalanche of complaining mail. The show tanked, but the laugh tracks stayed, planting the seeds of a television trend now reaching an Orwellian endgame – replacing the genuine with the fake.

Most of Charley’s original tape loops of laughter came from Red Skelton’s pantomime sketches on his CBS variety show or from a Marcel Marceau performance in Los Angeles. Douglass created a two-foot high “Laff Box,” operated like an organ, with a keyboard that could select the style, sex, and age of the laugh, plus a foot pedal to time the length of the reaction.

Charley could mix sounds of laughter to provide almost any kind of audience response imaginable, from soft titters to loud guffaws. He could even insert an occasional single laugh to get listeners to believe it just could be a real audience.

Originally, the “Laff Box” was intended simply to fill the sound holes of early ’50s TV shows that re-shot scenes after the studio audience had gone home. But its use was quickly expanded to exaggerate – or “sweeten” – existing laughter and to provide full-scale laughter for shows shot without a studio audience.

By the 1970s and ’80s, the omnipresence of canned laughter had diminished a bit when powerful producers like Larry Gelbart fought to keep shows like M*A*S*H* laugh-track free. Today, however, only a few popular sitcoms like “Malcolm in the Middle,” “Bernie Mac,” and HBO’s “Sex and the City” – not filmed in front of a studio audience – forego laugh tracks.

“The Simpsons,” currently the longest-running comedy series, has no laugh track. Fast and funny, this show acknowledges and encourages an intelligent audience by leaving out the laugh track. It doesn’t need to tell us when to laugh because it’s terribly funny on its own and because it trusts its audience to be smart enough to “get it.”

Television and cable network executives and situation-comedy producers, however, want us to laugh on cue. They don’t trust us to laugh at the right times. They’re afraid we won’t, and they should be. The fact is most current sitcoms aren’t very funny anymore.

If you doubt that, pay close attention some evening to the dialogue of a sitcom – any sitcom. Dead people will do the laughing for you. No matter how lame the humor, how banal the banter, or how unpleasant the sarcasm, you will hear approving laughter from laugh tracks, some of them older than “I Love Lucy.”

It’s a psychological card trick played on viewers. Ubiquitous peals of prerecorded laughter, not to mention hoots and whistles and dramatic gasps, are plugged into comedies over and over to indicate that we’ve heard something “funny.”

We’re made aware that a laugh is coming, we prepare emotionally to laugh, and when the moment comes, we do. It’s as easy as lying on a couch – and so much nicer than being disappointed.

Looking back, there have never been many comedies without laugh tracks. Maybe most people expect or even like laugh tracks. They remind us that what we’re watching isn’t serious and that we shouldn’t fret much about the ultimate outcome. It’s just for laughs. But if a program is just for laughs, it better make me laugh without any extra help.

While not the first to develop and use canned laughter, Charley Douglass became so successful that he quit his CBS job to form Northridge Electronics, which, along with Sound One, still dominates the laugh track industry.

Charley’s two-foot-high invention has now been reduced to the size of a laptop computer that contains hundreds of human sounds including giggles, guffaws, cries, moans, jeers, oohs and ahs. Isn’t that wonderful?

Footnote: In 1992, Charles Douglass was given a Lifetime Achievement Emmy for his “contributions to television.”

Observer correspondent Robert Brake can be reached at oobear@pacifier.com