Seek to Misconstrue + a
Failure: The Blog 
August 2018
- When This Executive Was Fired, He Took Charge
- Obeying The Speed Limit Has Never Been More Fun
- London Black Cabs Helped Uber Grow
- Bette Graham Created A Product To Fix Her Mistakes
- Flamin' Hot Cheetos Had An Interesting Start
July 2018
- Fear This Instead Of Failure
- Re-Releasing Songs Created Success
- A CEO's Purposeful Mistake
- The Tardy Student And The Unsolvable Problem
- Fixing Potholes Through Graffiti
June 2018
- A Surprising Mistake In The Oxford English Dictionary
- US Army Embraces Mistakes
- Blocking A Hymn
- Eddie Shore Was Truly A Tough Guy
- [Video] Elon Musk Didn't "Pivot" He Failed
May 2018
- 8 Examples of Mental Toughness Part 2
- Necessity Turned Accessory: Allen Iverson's Sleeve
- This Doctor Has Continued To Fail
- 8 Examples of Mental Toughness
- MIT Accidentally Creates New Smelting Process
April 2018
- Johnny Cash Quit Singing Lessons
- Cruise Control Came Out of Frustration
- Time Spent Gaming Pays Off In The Navy
- Rock Around The Clock Was a Commercial Failure
- Sigmund Freud Should Have Been Discouraged
March 2018
Laugh Track: Smart Failure
If you’ve watched television anytime in the past sixty years, you’ve experienced the sound of canned laughter. Turns out this is one of the most clever mistakes in TV history.
According to Wikipedia:
Historically, live audiences could not be relied upon to laugh at the correct moment. Other times, the audiences could laugh too long or too loud, sounding unnatural and forced or throwing off the performers’ rhythms. CBS sound engineer Charley Douglass noticed these, as he put it, “God-awful” responses, and took it upon himself to remedy the situation. If a joke did not get the desired chuckle, Douglass inserted additional laughter. If the live audience chuckled for too long, Douglass gradually muted the guffaws. 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 strongly as desired.
Let’s be clear: a live audience can’t be trusted to laugh at the right time, so an artificial audience is needed. Those fake laughs are better than the real ones!
Photo © Flickr User Gamma-Ray Productions
It’s not just sitcoms that get the sweetening treatment. Live shows such as the Emmy’s and the Academy Awards will receive some on-the-fly editing to alter the appearance of audience participation. Some producers feel that this is dishonest. Many modern comedies don’t rely on laugh tracks. But it seems pretty clear that this deception has been incredibly effective. Failure is the secret to success
