If the laughter of the audience was malicious we wouldn't show it.
Then after that came word processors and it's hard to make those laugh.
It's like your children talking about holidays, you find they have a quite different memory of it from you. Perhaps everything is not how it is, but how it's remembered.
What is a harp but an oversized cheese slicer with cultural pretensions?
I defy anyone to get a decision that quickly these days.
The comedians all finished their acts with a song. They would get a certain amount of money from the song publishers and would use that money to pay the writers. None of them paid very much for their comedy material, but it all added up.