Towards the end of Annie Hall, Woody Allen, as Alvy Singer, visits an edit room where his friend Rob is tinkering with footage from his new show. Every few seconds, Rob instructs the editor to add a giggle or a guffaw after his TV self delivers a punch line. Allen, still in his relatively principled pre-Sun Yi days, watches the whole thing with disgust. "Do you realize how immoral this all is?" he asks. "It’s kind of a joke within a joke: Allen was actually friends with Charles Douglass, the man who revolutionized the world of recorded laughter. But, seen in another way, it’s a rather touching moment: the comedian considering how technology can give the impression of hilarity in what amounts to a man-vs.-machine comic standup showdown. The leader of the crusade against canned laughter lost one of its greatest defenders when Larry Gelbart...
- 9/25/2009
- by Anna Jane Grossman
- Huffington Post
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