When have you been just utterly incapacitated by laughter?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’m not talking about a case of the giggles, or even hearty laughter, or even a good round of belly laughs. I mean, when have circumstances conspired just right to make your whole damn experience on this planet, even for a few minutes, just irrestistibly, gut-bustingly hysterical?

I was just thinking about this incident yesterday, and even after 15 or so years, it still brings a chuckle.

Two friends of mine and I decided to go spend a carefree day at Six Flags over Georgia back in 1995, I think. We all worked at the same shitty job, and we’d all bonded over after-work beer-and-bitch sessions. After a particularly long week, we all had the same Saturday off, so we decided to go blow off some steam on roller coasters. Awesome!

Well, they were actually boyfriend and girlfriend, which meant, of course, that I was usually the odd man out on the roller coasters. They got to sit together, and I had to draw my seatmate by sheer potluck.

Our first coaster of the day was the Great American Scream Machine. For those unfamiliar, it’s an old school wooden coaster. It has a huge first hill, lots of throwing you back and forth, it’s noisy as hell, and has lots of speed. Basically a good old fashioned adrenaline machine. As we boarded, my seatmate happened to be the most stereotypical Georgia cracker redneck guy you can possibly imagine. I say that with no rancor at all. I come from Georgia and Alabama cracka-ass stock. I’m qualified to evaluate the breed. The guy was tall, skinny, and sported a mullet, a feed cap, and (seriously) overalls. And good Lord, was he ever EXCITED to be there. He engaged me in enthusiastic conversation from the very start. We kinda bonded, and he was hilarious with just completely friendly, childlike enthusiasm for the whole dang roller coaster experience. Make no mistake, though. He wasn’t an ironic graduate student who was dressing down or anything. This guy was a complete hayseed. Sweet, yes. But a hayseed.

Anyway, the coaster started, and I felt all my work stress dissolve. I was yelling. Hayseed guy was yelling. My friends one seat up were laughing and screaming. Total good times and in-the-moment living.

The ride ends, and we come to a stop, and were sitting, waiting for the lap bars to be released, and I looked down at the jacket I was wearing. Apparently, in all the hoopla and excitement, my zipper had caught on the lap bar or something, and had broken. Hardly a bummer, but I commented, sort of under my breath, “Hum. I broke my zipper.”

The lap bar released, and the redneck guy JUMPS straight up, throws his hands in the air, turns to face the rest of the riders (we were near the front), and screams at the top of his lungs, “AAAAAAAAH BROKE MAAAAAAAAAH ZIPPERRRRRRRRRR!!!WOOHOO!!!”

It was pretty much, given the adrenaline and the circumstances, the funniest damn thing I had ever heard in my life. I physically collapsed back into the seat and laughed so hard that I was crying. All of us were. We somehow managed to stagger to a nearby picnic table, and all three of us sat there helpless for 5 or 10 minutes, just weeping with laughter. I mean, painful, side-splitting, oh-christ-I-can’t-breathe, falling over hysteria.

Set the tone for the whole day. Good times. :smiley:

2

It’s been years since I worked with them, but thinking about one particular afternoon in the office still makes me laugh. There were five of us working in one tiny office, and three of them were some of the funniest people I have ever met, and the other two of us held our own. I have never laughed so much at work as I did working with them - we’d go off on long benders, just egging each other on. The one I most vividly recall involved a peg-winged parrot and Rusty, the Friendly Giant’s sidekick chicken getting fried up at Kentucky Fried Chicken (“Rusty’s in the bucket!”). It’s making me laugh recalling it now. :slight_smile:

3

One night back in my young-adulthood, I was hanging out with my roommate and his girlfriend. We were drinking a few brews, watching TV, having a meal and after a while my roommate started to feel ill. Terrible stomach ache. Aw … you’ll be alright.

The night goes on and he starts to feel worse. It’s right down in his lower abdomen, it feels like he’s being stabbed, he says.

Fuck it, I’m taking you to the hospital.
No. Just let me lay on the couch for a little while. I think I’ll be ok.

So his girlfriend and I are huddled over on one couch, while the he’s moaning over on the other one on the other side of this loft apartment. I’m going over all the symptoms of appendicitis, since I’d had it before. I was sure that was the problem. We’re rationalizing a schedule. If he doesn’t feel better in an hour, he goes. Maybe we should stuff in the car and take him right now. Alright, 15 mintues and we’re shipping him to the ER. Etc.

As we are going over our plan, in hushed and concerned tones … from the other couch comes:
BBBBBRRRRRAAAAAAAAAPPPPP!!! … the longest loudest fart I’ve heard to this day, followed immediately by, “Ah, that feels better.”

On the floor. Me and his girlfriend just fell out, gut-busting, painful laughter for at least 15 minutes non-stop. I still chuckle remembering it.

4

Great story! Mine is kind of boring compared to that.

I’d read a few posts on the board about the movie The Aristocrats. All I knew was that it was very dirty and very funny. I knew nothing else about it, but I got it from Netflix. When I told my then-GF about it, she got excited. A little dirty? She was up for it.

For those of you who don’t know what it is, it’s a movie of one joke being told by a bunch of different comedians. The joke isn’t all that funny, but the point is to tell it in the dirtiest, most shocking way possible. If it’s told with children having sex with their dead grandparents, it’s probably being told right.

So I’m watching this with my GF, and it was not funny at all. GF was not amused. It was just gross and horrible and awful and I wanted to slink away in shame. I was sure that GF was going to kick me out and break up with me and possibly have me arrested. It was horrible.

OK, there was one bit that was mildly amusing. I smirked a little. But then I went back to being mortified. OK, there was another bit that made me smile a little. And then another.

By the time it got to the part where Mike the Mime was “telling” the joke, I couldn’t breathe. Tears were streaming down my face. I wasn’t laughing, I was just emitting a high pitched squeel. I was totally paralyzed. If a fire had broken out, I would have burned, because I couldn’t move a muscle.

At the end of it, GF was gushing on about how hilarious Bob Saget and Sarah Silverman were.

5

So my good friend Matt and I, at one of my college parties, after imbibing a fair amount and partaking in another, slightly less legal substance, were sitting on the couch telling bad jokes.

Now, Matt has always told this one joke that he bills as the “Worst Joke of All Time.” And it is. Here’s how it goes:

A man runs into a bar in a panic and says “Does anyone here own a six foot penguin?” When nobody responds in the affirmative, the man says “Oh shit, then I just ran over a nun!”

Yeah, not funny in the least, right? Well, he starts telling that joke. Only he’s drunk and stoned, and says “Does anyone here own a six foot nun?”

I, also drunk and stoned, respond with “Oh shit, I think I just ran over a penguin!”

We both pause for a couple of beats, and then say at the same time, “We just really fucked that up.” Neither of us had realized we’d gotten it backwards until then.

Laughed so hard we fell off the couch. At some point a friend of mine walked in the room, looked at us literally rolling on the ground and laughing so hard we were crying, shook her head, and walked back out. That got us going even worse.

My sides hurt the next morning.

6

While watching Borat.

The naked chase scene.

7

Why are farts funny? :confused: I really don’t know, but there’s no getting around the fact that THEY ARE FUNNY.

A few months ago my wife and I were driving home from some errands. She was talking, and I started to fart. It started off quietly enough, imperceptible under the ambient road noise. But the volume increased over the course of four or five seconds, with my wife automatically talking louder and louder to be heard over this noise-coming-from-she-knew-not-where. It only a split second before I was finished when she realized that it was in fact coming from my ass.

It was kind of funny at the time, but it was that evening while watching TV, when she recounted her reaction to the realization that my fart was drowning out her voice, that I just about died laughing. It was a solid 15 minutes of truly crippling paroxysmal laughter: inability to catch my breath, laughing so hard and so long tha the muscles on the back of my head hurt, tears streaming down my face, on and on. Sore abs the next day. It just wouldn’t stop.

I’ve had laughter episodes before, but never so long or so intense; it was incredible. I’m looking forward to the next one - which will probably also be fart-related.

8

The dirty version with the Seven Dwarfs is much funnier.

9

You know how laughter can be contageous?

I can’t find a cite for it, but I’ve heard that there was an entire village, maybe in Italy, that was incapacitated by laughter for three days.

10

Do tell.

11

I saw it in the theater. I was still working from home and it was just after my divorce so I went on my own and saw a weekday matinee. There were probably six other people at the showing. I laughed so hard and for so long that it gave me a headache.

The best was many years earlier. A friend of mine had a job driving an ice cream truck. One night a bunch of us dropped a lot of LSD and this friend drove us around in the truck all night. For those of you who have been “on the bus,” just imaging a crazy ass trip while being driven around in the back of an ice cream truck with a clown motif with the first few bars of The Entertainer on repeat.

12

Many years ago I went into the office with a bit of ceral stuck to my forehead. This was pointed out to me after I’d been at work for at least a few hours. The story’s stuck to me though, and gets told anytime I get together with friends from then.

That’s not the funny part though.

A few years ago, one my friends got married. There were a few of us hanging around their suite after the wedding, telling stories, and whatnot. The old story above, with a couple of embellishments gets tossed out, and the sixteen year old brother of the bride blurts out, “This is THAT guy!?” I don’t think anyone could speak for about five minutes.

13

Redwing, now I’m laughing. Holy shit, that’s funny.

When you say a piece of cereal, are we talking a tiny fleck of farina, or are we talking something bigger, like a Frosted Mini Wheat?

14

I think the last time was during the Olympic opening ceremonies. Amidst all the expensive pomp and circumstance, a big canoe is lowered from the ceiling. A man stands in the canoe and Bob Costas explains this is a tribute to the great tradition of fiddle playing in Quebec. The canoe, he adds, is haunted. The man starts playing his fiddle and the canoe moves in front of a big full moon.
The fiddler has gigantic hair, and when he’s in front of the moon, he casts a silhouette that looks exactly like Batman. And there he stands, playing the violin and looking like Batman, for a minute or two. At the end he does a little dance. I cracked up and laughed until I cried, then I rewound and watched it a couple more times. I was sure it was going to be an internet sensation, but for whatever reason I might be the only one who interpreted the performance that way.

A couple of weeks ago I visited my family and my father must have been in an unusually weird mood, or high. (Okay, it was both.) After a few hours of this, a Simpsons quote floats to the top of my brain and I say to my little brother, “I’d say the pressure’s gotten to dad, but … what pressure?”
It just struck a chord and we laughed until we couldn’t breathe.

But I think my favorite one of these moments happened about a year ago. My girlfriend and I were watching TV, and for whatever reason, she wanted to watch a special on the enormous homes of celebrities. We see palatial home after palatial home and hear how much they cost, and which bad movie paid for it. At the top of the list is Oprah Winfrey. Her house cost a quintillion dollars, a swimming pool, eleventeen garages, one garage that has a swimming pool in it, and it was carved out of an imported marble cliff by 100 clones of Leonardo da Vinci. Or something like that.
As the list of features goes on, I start doing an announcer voice and do a takeoff on the newsreel from Citizen Kane. ‘OPRAHDU! The world’s largest private pleasure palace’… etc. I thought it was pretty good, but my girlfriend thought it was hysterically funny, so I ended up laughing along with her for a long time.

15

About once a month. It’s one of the reasons I love my SO so much: he makes me laugh until I cry.

16

At this one company I worked at, I had a coworker and friend who was literally the funniest person I have ever known.

I was cutting my cake at a little office party for my birthday, but it was a frozen ice cream cake and very hard to cut through. My friend starts screaming at me in an Ahnold accent, “C’mon, you girly man! Cahn’t you cut de cake? Waaahooh!”

I slid down the wall and landed on my butt because I was laughing so hard. I was probably sitting there for a good five minutes. Still makes me smile.

17

I was working as a ward clerk on the Orthopedics floor one boring Sunday afternoon (By about 1:00 on Sunday all of the patients going home are gone, and they try to keep those beds empty for all the surgeries that start up again on Monday morning). Most of the nurses were done their charting and were all hanging out in the Nursing Station. We had this one male nurse in particular who was funny in general, but this day…

The charge nurse is on lunch. We had heard the overhead pages all day were from a new switchboard operator. Dan calls “0” and asks her if Dr. Tinkle’s light is on (if the doc is available in the hospital, his/her light is on, and switchboard can page overhead). She says there is no light for Dr. Tinkle. Dan says he’s from Urology (“oh, yes, isn’t that an ironic name,” says he) and he’s new to the hospital, so they must not have a light set up for him yet. In fact, someone on the floor had spoken to him earlier in the day, so would she please page him overhead to call the floor? Then he hangs up.

There is a short period of time where we could tell that she is deciding what to do, and then we hear “Dr. Tinkle call 3 East… Dr. Tinkle from Urology call 3 East.” All of us in the Nursing Station pretty much did a spit take and burst out laughing. Hilarity ensued.

The next page was for the coordinator (boss of the hospital on nights and weekends) to call the switchboard. We all thought she would be marching up to talk to us, and there was no way we could look innocent. Mascara was running down faces, we were crying so hard from laughing. Nothing ever came of it, though. I guess the switchboard girl took it as a bit of newbie hazing and didn’t complain, and no one else did either.

That still comes in second to the story I read about Dr. Cobb in the TMI thread last night. My husband came in from the garage because I was laughing so hard…

18

The “Don’t Stop Me Now” scene from Shaun of the Dead. After watching the good guys beating on the zombies in time with the music and Shaun’s girlfriend throw an errant dart that hit him in the head, I was already laughing enough so that my eyes were watering. I grabbed the remote to pause the movie for a minute so I could catch my breath and dry my eyes. Unfortunately (not really), as I was doing this, the camera shot changed, and what the screen froze on was Shaun, wild-eyed and his mouth wide open in a warrior yell, brandishing a cricket bat and with a dart stuck in his head. This was even funnier, and I couldn’t do anything but collapse over on the couch, gasping for breath. It was GREAT.

Extreme nitpick re: The Aristocrats: It’s Billy the Mime. And yes, his take on the joke was one of the best in the movie.

19

Linky? I could use a laugh.

20

Story 1.

I was in high school. Sitting at lunch with the 3 other girls I sat with every single day.

A B

Me D

Someone left a nickel on the table. Girl D was clowning around and tossed it at B. It went straight down her front and got stuck in her bra. She laughed, bent forward, and fumbled under the table until she was able to retrieve it.

She put it on the table.

We were giggling.

I jokingly picked it up and without even looking carefully, tossed it in B’s direction.

It went straight down her front and got stuck in her bra.

I thought all 4 of us were going to pee ourselves laughing.

Story 2.
Out with another couple, to Wolf Trap for a show. It’s intermission. They’re sitting directly behind Typo Knig and me. The wife rummaged in her purse and brought out a tin of Altoids and offered them to us. I started to giggle and said something about them not being useful in such a public place. The wife looked blank, while Typo Knig and I were snickering. The husband whispered in his wife’s ear and her face dawned with comprehension. We were howling for the next 5 minutes.

A month later, I got an email from her that said simply “they really DO work!!”. I did not need to know that about them :wink: (and yes, I know the “embarassed” smiley is appropriate but egad, you know what that looks like!!!).

Story 3.
A couple of months ago, Typo Knig was filling out a medical history form. A question was “do you drink alcohol?”. He answered yes. Then the next question was, oddly, not “how often and how much” but “what?”. He started writing, while speaking what he was writing.
“Beer.”
“Wine.”
“Sterno”, I offered helpfully.
“Ster- hey, cut that out, I started to write that down!!”.
Honestly it was 10 minutes before either of us could breathe!