Theaters used to hire audience members to clap, laugh, and cry.

Italian Opera House in Paris, 1800s

A public performance can be stressful for the actor, singer, or orator tasked with delivering the goods, not to mention the behind-the-scenes author of the creative endeavor. So it should perhaps come as little surprise that audience members have long been employed to supply an outward show of support for those on stage. This concept goes at least as far back as the heyday of the ancient Greeks in the fourth century BCE, when playwright and poet Philemon was known to stockpile his audiences with enthusiastic allies to help win competitions.

The practice reached its peak in early-19th-century Paris opera houses, where theater administrators coordinated with organized groups of “claquers,” derived from the French term for clapping, to prod the bourgeois crowds into responding appropriately at key moments. Such arrangements would typically involve the claque leader examining a show’s script and conferring with the director and performers about optimal times to display emotion. The claquers would then disperse among an audience, with some members tasked with laughing loudly at jokes, others charged with weeping during tender scenes, and still others there to bellow heartily for an encore.

A claque leader could be well compensated (though underlings often received only free entry to a show), perpetuating a system in which these professionals held considerable influence over performers. In one example, the mother of an up-and-coming dancer declared that her daughter needed no “protection” from the hired hands in the audience, resulting in said dancer being embarrassed by the stony silence that followed her routine.

Although the claque may seem like a curious relic of the past, the practice was still going strong in Italian opera houses by the early 1960s, and in 2013, The New York Times profiled the well-oiled machinations of the claque-filled audiences of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater. Just as the Greeks provided the building blocks of dramatic structure that endured through the ages, it seems their method for igniting a favorable audience reception and easing the anxieties of artists packed plenty of staying power as well.

By the Numbers

Did you know?

Television laugh tracks debuted in 1950.

Those who snicker at the concept of the claque may want to pause to consider how their own entertainment experiences were shaped by laugh tracks. Tracks of prerecorded laughter were first developed for radio programs in the late 1940s, before surfacing on the new medium of television with The Hank McCune Show in 1950. But the technology took a leap forward with the debut of the "Laff Box" in 1953, spurring the widespread use of prerecorded laughter to supplement studio audience reactions and convince viewers they were watching a surefire hit.

By the 1960s, most TV comedies had done away with studio audiences altogether in favor of the laugh track, and even animated fare such as The Jetsons featured canned laughter. Although this device began falling out of favor with the rise of new comedies such as 30 Rock and Arrested Development in the 2000s, the laugh track continues to be employed by traditional-style sitcoms, and still can be heard in its full-throated glory across the cable landscape by way of another TV innovation: the rerun.