Last night on his “ridiculist” segment, AC got an uncontrollable case of the giggles while reading a pun filled story about Gerard Depardieu’s recent airplane urination incident.
The jokes aren’t funny, but AC’s inability to stop laughing at them is. It’s kind of adorable, and what makes it all the more so is that the thing that makes him lose his famous cool is a bunch of 3rd grade level pee and poop jokes. Very humanizing, and his giggles are very infectious. If you can watch without at least cracking a smile, you’re made of stone.
The giggles are hard to control in a performance once you get started and everyone else is laughing also (c.f. Harvey Korman and Tim Conway).
Personal anecdote - in high school, I was part of the cast of Moliere’s The Doctor in Spite of Himself (mentioned 'cause it’s French like Depardieu). We did one of the funny bits, the audience laughed (we paused appropriately), and then, just as I was getting ready to deliver the next line, someone in the audience got the joke late. Which would have been fine, except he laughed loudly and exactly like a donkey: HEE-HAW!
I lost it, as did the rest of the cast, which of course got the audience going. I figured that if I could find someone who wasn’t laughing, I could look at them and regain control - unfortunately, that person didn’t exist. I don’t know how long the break was, but it was probably one of the best and longest laughs I’ve ever had (short of the sparrow hawk incident).
Actually the impressive thing to me is that he recovered from them enough to move on.
I don’t think I’ve ever successfully done that without complete separation from whatever was causing them. In my 9th grade geometry class another student and I succumbed to them and couldn’t stop for more than an hour.
To this day if I really focus on what triggered them I can still feel it lingering down in the pit of me just waiting to embarrass me further. (Because the cause of “the giggles” is never actually funny enough to have anybody else understand if you try to explain.)
Yeah, I saw this live yesterday and didn’t laugh at the jokes but I did [del]at[/del] with him. It was pretty easy to identify with because at some point most of us have been in a similar, helpless state. He was really trying to get back in control but for awhile simply couldn’t. I almost felt kinda sorry for him at one point when he got lodged in falsetto.
I’m not going to YouTube at work but yeah, I do remember at some point he finally appeared to almost reach down and grab some unpleasant memory to solidify himself. I was wondering if anyone else caught this because it was pretty amusing.
I gather from what he said in the middle of the clip that someone offscreen was laughing, and it was making it hard for him to hold it together. Of course, him asking them to stop probably made them laugh harder, which made it even more difficult.
The canonical example, of course, is Dad at Comedy Barn, wherein a gentlemen named Doug manages to cause a mass crack-up that stalls the would-be comedian’s routine for several minutes.
That was so frikkin’ adorable. I think it was the combination of the off-screen laughter and “Depar-doo” that did him in.
Since Craig Ferguson has had Josh Robert Thompson voicing his robot sidekick, there have been a few moments when Craig just loses it (here’s the best example). They play off each other very well.
Not sure where you are OFFICIALLY in the food chain, but welcome to grandpa-hood.
ETA: Because it was totally adorable. Though it also shows he’s unlikely to be providing grandchildren. Which are likely to be PITAs, anyway. I tell my daughter, “Drop off your dogs. I can kick them if they piss me off. Don’t get kids until I’m dead.”
Cooper put himself on tonight’s Ridiculist. He also commented that what made it particularly embarrassing was that his giggling sounded “like a 13 year old girl meeting Justin Bieber”, which pretty much summed it up.
Watching Anderson Cooper get the giggles really was adorable. Doesn’t hurt that his giggles are a bit infectious because they’re so cute. I’m cursed with the same problem, and once I get the giggles everyone else laughs, too, because they’re laughing at my laughter. Then I get all teary-eyed and red-faced, and kinda have a hard time breathing for a while until I finally calm down. I wouldn’t change it, though.
it was one of the cutest funniest things on tv. i saw it live and also his rediculist. the viewer comments were amusing. “my cats are still looking for the wounded chipmunk”.
how did sampiro miss this? i know he watches anderson.
There is no excuse for him to remain in the closet after this. Maybe if it was a video of him licking Zac Efron’s abs it would have seemed a little less gay (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
As a teacher, I’m supposed to be the adult, but in teaching teenagers there have been a few instances over the years where I’m lying on my desk, giggling and weeping uncontrollably, which means 98% of the class is also a mass of hysteria. The trigger is often something, as said upthread, that if explained to someone else, is unfunny. Stolen from the notorious Skippy’s List is one of my new classroom rules: If the thought of something makes you giggle for over 15 seconds, you are probably not allowed to do it.
He recovers more quickly than Cooper did.