They also laughed. We kept the tape.
the laugh track archivequarter 2 of 4two-drink minimum, no cover, no refunds
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they claim what you said was self-evident. This is the second quarter, kept on file: the part where the room was really enjoying itself.
Laugh track · press to play
laughs on file: 7 laughs played: 0 laughs that aged well: 0
The second quarter
Loudest quarter. Ignoring is silent and fighting is expensive. Laughing is neither. It is cheap, it is social, and it gets applause from the other people who also have not built anything. That is why it is the quarter everyone remembers being in the room for, and the quarter nobody remembers being on the wrong side of.
Same voice, both ends. The person who says "who the hell wants that" in the second quarter is available in the fourth to say "well, obviously." No costume change. No stop at "I was wrong." The archive exists because memory does not.
Honest caveat. Most new things do fail. The laughter is often right on the numbers. Its problem is not that it is sometimes right; it is that it never keeps score, and so it learns nothing from the times it laughed at the telephone. This page keeps score. That is the entire service.
A laugh costs nothing to produce and nothing to retract, which is why nobody bothers to retract it.
Scorer's notes
Sourcing. The telephone memo is Western Union, 1876, and is quoted from company history rather than a surviving original, so it is on file with a small asterisk. The Times editorial ran October 9, 1903; Kitty Hawk was December 17. Warner is 1927, on the record. Zanuck is 1946, quoted widely and never denied. Decca is 1962, as the room remembered it. Stoll's essay is Newsweek, February 1995, and he has been a good sport about it ever since. Ballmer is 2007, on video, laughing.
Not on file. "There is a world market for maybe five computers," attributed to Thomas Watson, is not on the tape. It is probably apocryphal. A laugh archive that includes made-up laughs would be doing the thing it is complaining about, so it is left out. Even the greatest hits of laughing at the future include a track nobody actually recorded.
The rest of the record. This wall covers one quarter. The full record book, all four quarters and the standings, is next door at ignorethedoubters.com. Same league. Same result.
The laughing is free.
Building is the part that costs something.
This message was brought to you by the Worth Building Institute. Everything worth building was laughed at on the way in, which the archive suggests is the standard entrance. Results obvious.
see what's worth building →no audio was harmed. all quotations dated and attributed. the archive accepts new laughs at any time and has never once had to file a correction.