Not that a television show trying to augment its audience's squeals of applause-sign-prompted delight with piped-in, "sweetened" sound is anything new, but the What I'm Watching blog noticed that this weekend's East Coast feed of SNL— i.e., the live one you don't expect them to tamper with—featured a weird moment of obviously canned applause lingering after the "normal" crowd noise following host Hugh Laurie's introduction finally died down. Whether the initial alteration was by deceitful design or just someone in the audio booth mistakenly touching a button labeled "FAKE APPLAUSE—PRESS ONLY FOR LORNE MICHAELS CAMEOS!", the extra noise was removed from the West Coast feed (watch the "live" version here, and then compare to our professional-quality, TiVo-and-digital-camera reproduction of the Pacific time zone version above), a seeming attempt to keep their West Coast viewers from having their belief in the purity of SNL's live audience response shaken by some stray, tinny sounds of appreciation.