Chapter One

In Steven Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), the android David (Haley Joel Osment) tries desperately to appear human and so win the love of his adoptive mother, Monica (Frances O'Connor). In one of the film's most affecting scenes, David and his "parents" laugh at the way Monica eats her spaghetti. At first, David's laughter appears remarkably human, making us momentarily forget that he is a robot (figure 1). But gradually this laughter takes on an eerie and uncanny quality that makes him seem less human than ever. Jonathan Rosenbaum writes that the scene asks us to consider the line between mechanical and real laughter: "The laughter of David and his adopted parents becomes impossible to define as either forced or genuine, mechanical or spontaneous, leaving us perpetually suspended over the question as if over an abyss" (2001, 36). There is nothing new about this phenomenon. Though the spasmodic and nonsemantic nature of laughter makes it seem an unlikely carrier of meaning, it has played an ongoing role in the presentation of the authentically human in mass-mediated texts, notably on early genres of phonographic recordings and the broadcast laugh track.

The sound of uninhibited laughter, produced both by performers and by audiences, was an important index of authentic presence used to bridge the gap between recorded sound and the listener. The recording studios of the phonograph industry represented a radically new type of performance space, where performers had to develop new stylistic techniques meant, in Jonathan Sterne's words, to "stand in for re