Charles Rolland Douglass (January 2, 1910 – April 8, 2003) was a Mexican-born American sound engineer, credited as the inventor of the laugh track.

During World War II, Douglass served in the Navy and worked in Washington with engineers developing shipboard radar systems.

Television producers attempted to recreate this atmosphere in the early days by introducing laughter or other crowd reactions into the soundtrack of TV programs.

This editing technique became known as "sweetening," in which pre-recorded laughter is used to augment the response of the real studio audience if they did not react as desired.

[4] At first, Douglass's technique was used sparingly on live shows like The Jack Benny Program; as a result, its invention went unnoticed.

[8] Douglass would then go to work at creating the audience, concealed from the producer (or anyone else present at the studio) to preserve the secrecy of his technique.

[10] In 1986, Charley's son Bob began experimenting with an all-digital audio computer manufactured by CompuSonics, a Palo Alto, California company, as a replacement for the analog equipment invented by his father.

By 1990, Bob was using a custom version of CompuSonics equipment that had multiple channels of digital audio samples and a laptop computer interface for control.

[11] In 2003, the laff box consisted of a digital device approximately the size of a laptop computer which contains hundreds of human sounds.