cally and in their own interests. Instead, it is the behavior of the audience that seems strange. Why should we laugh more at comedy material afloat in a sea of mechanically fabricated merriment? And why should we think that comic flotsam funnier? The executives aren't really fooling us. Anyone can recognize dubbed laughter. It is so blatant, so clearly counterfeit, that there can be no confusing it with the real thing. We know full well that the hilarity we hear is irrelevant to the humorous quality of the joke it follows, is created not spontaneously by a genuine audience but artificially by a technician at a control board. Yet, transparent forgery that it is, it works on us! The Principle of Social Proof To discover why canned laughter is so effective, we first need to understand the na- ture of yet another potent weapon of influence: the principle of social proof. This
purpose and installed in the chancery building, in Magnus' bedroom, up to the time when they were burned." Three days later, he sent in his reserves: "Greater caution than is always exercised here would be impossible. The text of telegrams which have arrived is read to me at night in my dwelling house by Magnus, in a low voice. My servant, who does not understand German, sleeps in an annex. . . . Here there can be no question of carbon copies or waste paper." The shrieks of hilarity that this occasioned Hall, Page, and Room 40 were not heard in Berlin. Its last doubts swept away by the low voice, the steel safe, the scattered ashes, and the non-German-speaking servant, the Foreign Office capitulated. "After your telegram it is hardly conceivable that betrayal took place in Mexico. In face of it the indications which point in that direction lose their force. No blame rests on either you or Magnus." [Codebreakers 152.jpg] "Exploding in his Hands
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