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I was sitting on the couch last year. My 17-year-old daughter is next to me, phone six inches from her face (the mandated viewing distance for anyone born after 2008). She's watching something. Some guy doing the David Attenborough voice that everyone does now, where you describe fish like you're narrating a war crime. Very serious. Very BBC.

She's not laughing.

Then she scrolls down.

And the sound that comes out of this child.

Full-body, can't-breathe, tears-streaming laughter. The kind I've been trying to get out of her since she turned thirteen and decided my existence is a personal insult.

So naturally, I lean over to see what broke through the wall of teenage contempt. She tilts the phone toward me, and I realize she's not watching the video anymore.

She's reading the comments.

Quick context. Earlier in 2025, a photographer filmed a black seadevil—the nightmare anglerfish with the glowing lure dangling off its face like a fishing pole designed by someone who hates you—swimming near the surface off Tenerife. Which basically never happens. These things live a mile down, in pitch darkness. Sunlight is not in their contract.

But this one drifted up. Probably dying. It died shortly after. The whole internet got emotional. A lonely deep-sea monster, finally reaching the surface, and then… death. It's the kind of sad where you feel weird for being sad about a fish, but you're still sad.

But my daughter wasn't crying anymore. She was howling. Because the comments had turned this tragic nature documentary into the funniest thing she'd seen all week.

Someone wrote, "This is literally my ex. Dangles one nice thing in front of you, then devours you whole." Forty thousand likes. Someone replied, "At least the angler fish is upfront about it." Sixty-two thousand likes. And someone else just wrote, "My therapist doesn't need to see this." A hundred and twenty thousand likes. For seven words. I've worked on things for months that got less engagement than seven words from a stranger with a profile picture of an anime character I don't recognize and never will.

My daughter looked at me and said something that broke my brain a little.

The good part. She meant the comments.

I've spent twenty-five years working in media, and my teenager just informed me that the actual product is the bathroom graffiti. And here's the thing that's been keeping me up at night…

I think she's right.

I think the most important creative force in modern culture isn't the filmmaker or the musician or the creator or the influencer. It's the anonymous person in the comments who wrote something funnier than the thing they're commenting on.

We're told from the moment we can hold a crayon that creators create, audiences consume. There's a stage and there's seats. The people on stage are doing the important work, and the people in seats should be grateful they were invited. Say thank you. Clap when appropriate. Buy the merchandise. Go home.

But here’s what I’m coming to realize…

And I have twenty-four hundred years of evidence.

Which is annoying.

I wish I didn't.

But I do.

Paris, 1820. You're a playwright. Opening night arrives. The theater is packed. The curtain rises. Your actors deliver their lines beautifully.

And nobody claps. Not because it's bad. Because the audience hasn't been told to clap yet. They're waiting for permission. From professionals.

A man named Sauton had just opened what might be the most extraordinary business in the history of entertainment: an agency that supplied professional audience members. For hire. On demand. Like TaskRabbit, but for emotional reactions.

They were called the claque, from the French word "claquer," to clap. And by 1830, they were organized and open for business.

Each claque operated under a chef de claque who deployed specialists accordingly. Yes, specialists. With actual job titles.

The commissaires memorized the best parts of the play and loudly pointed them out to neighbors (the original "Wait for it..." comment guy).

The rieurs were professional laughers whose entire job was to sell every joke.

The chatouilleurs (the "ticklers") kept the audience in good humor between scenes, like human mood lighting.

The pleureuses were women hired to cry during melodramas, dabbing their eyes so convincingly that the real audience would start crying too.

And the bisseurs. Their whole job was to stand up at the end and scream for an encore. That was the gig.

A literal comments section, performing live, every single night. With job titles. And pay.

The chef de claque had more power than the director. More power than the actors. More power than the guy who wrote the thing. Actors were regularly extorted. Pay the claque, or your opening night gets booed into oblivion.

Richard Wagner pulled his opera Tannhäuser from the Paris stage in 1861 because the claque destroyed its first three performances. They showed up late on purpose, talked through the overture, and booed. Wagner. Defeated by the audience.

And Hector Berlioz wrote in 1854 that the claqueurs had proven themselves to be "canny practitioners" whose "craft has been elevated to an art."

An art. The audience reaction wasn't a response to art. It WAS art. Berlioz said so. Take it up with Berlioz.

Now jump forward two thousand years to the part I find genuinely haunting.

Early 1950s. Television is brand new. Comedy shows are trying to figure out a problem: when you watch something funny alone in your living room, it's just... less funny. Something's missing.

A CBS sound engineer named Charley Douglass noticed this. And what he did next shaped American culture more than almost any writer, director, or actor of the twentieth century—and almost nobody knows his name.

Douglass had spent World War II working on naval radar systems. After his shifts, he'd go home and do something that would sound completely insane if you saw it happening. He'd bring home tapes of TV shows and sit at his kitchen table, night after night, hunting for one thing: audience laughter. The perfect chuckle. The ideal guffaw.

He found them. He isolated them. He spliced them onto tape reels. And then—because this was a man who worked on radar during the war and clearly was not interested in half measures—he built a machine.

He called it the Audience Response Duplicator.

Everyone else called it the Laff Box.

It was built from organ parts and vacuum tubes and household appliances, like if Home Depot had a nightmare. It was padlocked shut. Only immediate family members were allowed to see inside.

Inside: thirty-two tape loops. Ten laughs per loop. Three hundred and twenty total laughs, organized on a keyboard so you could play them like a musical instrument. Press one key, you get a polite chuckle. Press three at once, you get a raucous house. This man invented a synthesizer for human joy and then locked it in a box so no one else could use it.

The Munsters. Bewitched. The Beverly Hillbillies. Gilligan's Island. The Brady Bunch. Every laugh you heard was Charley Douglass, sitting in a dark editing room, manufacturing a community of people who did not exist. Fake friends, laughing at jokes, so you would feel less alone.

Weird fact: After Douglass died in 2003, his Laff Box, the most influential machine in television history, ended up in a storage locker. The family stopped paying rent. A guy bought the whole locker for $650, mostly because he wanted the washer and dryer. He almost threw the Laff Box in the trash. Television history. Almost garbage.

Fast forward to now: A trend research firm called OK COOL recently surveyed 2,700 people across four continents about how they consume culture. And the data confirms something we all feel but haven't said out loud:

The comments section isn't a reaction to the content anymore. The comments section is content. Original, consumable, often better content than the thing it's attached to. People don't scroll to the comments to find out if the video was good. They scroll because that's where the good stuff is. The video is the appetizer. The comments are the meal.

91% of respondents lurk in comments sections. Only 29% actively participate. OK COOL calls them "the real ones". They’re shaping how the other 71% feel. And they're creating a parallel entertainment stream that the 71% actively seek out.

65% of respondents said anonymous strangers are the funniest people online.

Not comedians. Not creators with ring lights and editing software and Patreon supporters. Anonymous strangers. People with default profile pictures and screen names like @filmgoblin420. And they're not funny the way a laugh track is funny, by signaling "laugh now." They're funny because they're producing actual jokes. In the margins. For free. For fun.

One-third of people under thirty self-describe as "haters." And they don't mean it as a confession. They mean it as a job title.

It's fan fiction for hot takes. Except fan fiction acknowledges the source material as the main event. This is different. The source material is the prompt. The comments are the art. The original creator is just providing raw materials. They're lumber. And the commenters are building houses.

Dumb Word of the Day: SCHOLIAST

It sounds like a disease. It's not.

A scholiast is an ancient commentator who wrote notes in the margins of literary texts. In ancient Greece and Byzantium, these anonymous scholars would take works by Homer, Sophocles, Aristotle (the A-list creator) and scribble notes in the margins. Corrections. Jokes. Observations. Disagreements. Hot takes. Ancient shitposting, but in ink.

For many ancient texts, the scholia have turned out to be more historically valuable than the works themselves. The scholiasts were the first comments section. Anonymous voices in the margins. And their scribbles outlasted empires.

Let’s use it in a sentence: "I posted a thoughtful Letterboxd review of Oppenheimer—three paragraphs, specific references to Nolan's IMAX aspect ratios—but some scholiast named @filmgoblin420 wrote 'Nolan really said let me cook (a nuclear bomb)' and got forty-seven thousand likes while I got two. One of which was my mother."

Your Challenge: The Margin Note Experiment

Step one: Pick one piece of content this week. Don't watch it first. Read the comments first. Before you consume the content, consume the reaction. Notice how it changes your experience.

Step two: Find something you actually liked. Add to it. Not a hot take. Not snark. Try to write the comment that makes the content better than the creator made it. Create in the margins. Become @filmgoblin421.

Step three: Send both the original content and your comment to a friend. Ask them which they liked more. Be prepared for the answer.

Bonus points if your comment gets more engagement than the original post. .

Until next time. Stay curious, stay anonymous, and remember — the person in the peanut gallery was never watching the show. They were making one. They were always making one. And the rest of us were just providing the raw materials.

See you in the comments.

—David