On the recording of "Laugh Track,” Ellison goes all out. It's another first person narration, so he can take more liberties with the text, and the narrator is a television writer who would naturally tend to the flamboyant. However, the author goes a bit overboard. I counted roughly six dozen additions and alterations, from stutters and repetition of key words to about eight new sentences (e.g., "You hear what I'm sayin'?", "There is the daily news, right"?, and "She kept calling him a stronzo"). The hoarseness evident on "Go Toward the Light" grows further ragged and phlegm-y as this story progresses. Wally Modisett, the Phantom Sweetener, starts out an ominous whisper but becomes so manic and lively that he is virtually indistinguishable from the narrator.
There are at least three mispronunciations. Ebulliently comes out "eb-yool-iently," and offal becomes "oaf-fawl," perhaps in an attempt to assure the listener he is not saying "awful" -- a vain goal since the two words are, however unhappily, homonyms. And why he would read Boolean as "boe-OH-lee-un" when it was named for the British mathematician George Boole and appears in dictionaries as "BOO-lee-un" is beyond me. (Ellison might use the excuse that the errors are those of a not-highly-literate TV writer/narrator, but still ... .) One genuine vocal slipup is preserved for all time: in the phrase "would a blindfold serve to palliate this unseemly paranoia of yours?" (when our hero first encounters Modisett), you can hear the tiniest hesitation in "blindfold," as if he had been distracted by something, before Ellison tumbles headlong into the next word, which comes out something like "soov" or "soothe." Considering that, as written, the phrase is something of a tongue-twister, it’s a forgivable slip.
To linger on these problems is not to suggest this is a poor performance (it is in fact, engagingly ebullient), but merely to highlight what is so rare as to be effectively nonexistent in Ellison's audio work. The rest of the stories and readers on Hollywood Fantasies don't even measure up to "Laugh Track," for the most part, either in content or performance. Jamie Farr's raw voice sounds perfect for Robert Sheckley's fine story "The Never-Ending Western Movie" but he commits the unpardonable sins of referring to "choe-la" cactus and Civil War "duh-gehrio-types." David Schow's "One for the Horrors" and Robert Silverberg's "Reality Unlimited" have great concepts that end weakly (and Steve Kmetko, reading the first, says "chitten-us" for chitinous and "in-egg-ZOR-able," while Susan Anspach's girlish lisp is not exactly appropriate for the Silverberg and may grate on some ears). David Madden's "Werewind," a so-so horror thriller, is well rendered by Michael Reaves, whose voice has an arresting timbre, but he trips up by reading coalesced as "coe-uh-laced" and incongruous as "in-con-GREW-us." I think I heard two different readers say "mis-CHEE-vee-us." Don't these folks ever use a dictionary?
Nobody else manages to distinguish between different voices very well, either. The Sheckley, Henry Slesar's "The Movie Makers" and David Morrell's "Dead Image" (about a James Dean copycat -- a Dennis Hopper figure makes an appearance) are the only stories that really measure up to Ellison's in interest. John Jakes's early "The Man Who Wanted To Be In the Movies" -- not to put too fine a point on it -- sucks: It telegraphs all its unsurprising plot turns, loads on the obvious adjectives and adverbs, and doesn't offer a single character you could give a damn about.
Here's another item for the mislabeling sweepstakes: Ed Gorman's short and sweet "Gunslinger" is said to run through all of side 7 and onto 8, when it is the Morrell that starts on 7 and takes up all of 8.
So take this one out of a library or rent it from a store, or buy the 1999 Dove collection that reissues "Laugh Track" and skip the rest.
This recording of “Laugh Track” was reissued in 1999 by Dove Entertainment (later Audio Literature), as part of the collection, “The Voice From the Edge: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.”
