This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

For nearly five decades, the Laft Track was ubiquitous on television setcams,

but in the early 2000s, it began to disappear. What happened? How did we get from the

Rockas-Cand Laughter of the Beverly Hillbillies to these silent, sly, joke every 20 seconds of 30 Rock?

The curious story of the Laft Track starts with one man who created the Laft Track as a homemade

piece of technology that took over the sound of television and then fell out of fashion with the

rise of a more modern sense of humor. What happened to the Laft Track is just one of the cultural

mysteries that are being explored on Slate's new monthly podcast, Decoder Ring. Here presenting

the first episode of Decoder Ring, called the Laft Box, is host Willa Pascon.

When Paul Iverson was eight years old, he would come home from school, turn on the TV, and watch

the Pink Panther show. It was 1982, and Paul was watching the show in syndication on WGN Chicago.

Some channels aired versions of the Laft Track, and some aired versions without.

I always watched the ones that had the laughter because it was, I guess, as a child,

it was communal to me. I said, oh, there's people watching with me, and they sound like adults,

they don't sound like children. He loved the show so much that he would tape it, but he didn't have a

VCR, so he would use a tape recorder, one that only captured the sound, even though the Pink Panther

show has very little dialogue. Well, even listening to, that's mostly what the Pink Panther sounds like.

What I was doing was allowing myself to hear the Lafts rather than watch the show visually,

like watching a show with your eyes closed, and I basically started studying this, of who are

these people laughing? Why are they laughing in the same order as they did last time?

Paul's early encounters with the Pink Panther fostered a lifelong interest in Laft tracks.

Paul lives in LA and works as an account manager at an insurance company, but he's a passionate

...