Obscure History Unto Adventure

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From 1950 to 1970 Charley Douglass has a monopoly on the laugh track. With a custom built machine know as the "laff box" , which was was only seen and used by the Douglass family (and locked up when not in use) it was thought vital to the success of nearly every prime time comedy. Not relying on a mere single sample , instead a carefully curated collection of 320 laughs , each named and chosen by Douglass, who would rotate , retire , update and replace laughs as time went on , and used to carefully weave a custom audience response as required for the scene.

The wiki is worth a read, and my paraphrasing is probably misrepresentative

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laugh_trackhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laugh_track

Now I give you some ways to use it as modern horrorish adventures:

Charlys use of someones laughter causes them to suddenly spiral into depression, resulting in gruesome suicides. 

His Laff-box is actually too effective and is making the entire population placid and easily manipulated by media. U.S.A goverment hasn't realized this but Russian, East Berlin and Chile all have and are attempting to steal it without drawing attention to  its value. They are all independently trying to get it and are actively interfering with each other.

The Laff-box is actually counteracting a deep psychic poisoning by a supernatural force  (awakening elder god, cult, psychic wing of USSR etc) . Charly regrets actions he's taking in order to do his work (combine with any other idea)

Multiple cases of "laughing disease" where someone is found unable to respond to anything other than with laughter and little awareness of who or where they are.  Cases all show signs of having had some form of brain surgery but that's suppressed by interested sinister government forces. Turns out Charly has been kidnapping vagrants and operating on them to trigger "perfect" laughs to record. He needs to use fresh laughs on occasion and the increase demand for his services have meant he's needing to get more subjects and get his family involved and mistakes are getting made, resulting a number of escapes

When someone whose laugh was recorded dies their ghost is unable to advance to afterlife , resulting in sets using the laff box getting dangerously haunted

Recorded laughs are funnier when the subject recorded is dead. Charly son has fallen out with father , set up a rival laugh track company and has engineered a number of fatal accidents of live studio audiences to get his recorded laughs more effective. But he needs more!!!