I listened to thisthe morning after my mother in law passed away. I had a hard time catching my breath for a couple minutes. The word Armageddon has had a totally different meaning to me since.
I couldn’t control my laughter when I tried to tell a co-worker about a College Jeopardy contestant who guessed “hymen” when the answer was “stamen”.
One of the few TV shows that make me laugh out loud is Impractical Jokers. I can watch some of them over and over and they still make me laugh.
It was the latter. C.U. Mehta, alligator?
Another episode that stands out to me also involved Mrs. J. (folie a deux, anyone?). We were traveling through darkest Pennsylvania when we stopped at a restaurant called The Evergreen. A fairly nice place for an early dinner, we thought. Across the restaurant but clearly audible was an unfortunate man out for a meal with his family. He evidently was a quadriplegic, and was having trouble getting his food down. Loudly. After some minutes of intermittent, semi-spectacular hacking and gagging noises (to the point where I was mentally reviewing my Heimlich skills), I glanced over at Mrs. J. to see if she was similarly enjoying our fine dining experience, and the moment nearly set us both off (she had to get up and leave the table to suppress what would have been a highly regrettable outburst).
I just can’t take that woman anywhere. 
Two times come to mind:
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In high school aged about fourteen, we had to do tech drawing the old fashioned way with pencils and set-squares. One task was to draw an isometric view of a “nut” the sort of thing that screws down onto a bolt in engineering. Some of the best finished drawings were usually put up on the wall by the teacher and sure enough the following week one was up there. I was sat right by it and it said “Philip Garland - Hexagonal Nut” printed in 10mm stencil right under the drawing. Some wag had marked it up so it read “Philip Garland has Hexagonal Nuts” instead. I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe and it still makes me laugh even now over thirty years later.
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Working on an IT tech support desk in my late twenties we used to get regular calls from companies in the locality who bought our stuff, and you’d build up a rapport with the usual callers. Well one company had a new guy we didn’t know and he called a lot for a couple of weeks with rookie questions so he started to stand out a bit. Anyway, he started flirting with one of the secretaries who answered the incoming calls and even sent the odd e-mail with flirty messages and funny pictures. He’d never met this secretary (and she wasn’t interested anyway) so slowly over many days we started dropping extra lines into the conversation hinting that she wasn’t quite normal, and started replying to his e-mails with photos taken from fugly.com making out that they were pictures of her. One time we sent a photo of a real hosebeast with the comment that the secretary thought it was a lovely picture of her as “you could hardly see the hairs on her back”. About five of us were helpless all afternoon struggling to breathe through the laughter as one or another kept bringing up the e-mail or printing it out.
Boys and their humour, eh!?
It’s funny in the future, too. As evidenced by the hit comedy show, “Ow, my balls!”
Me neither.
Thank Og you were here to correct us! To think, we might have gone through our whole lives ignorantly laughing at things without your approval or permission. The horror!
Bless you for steering us toward the path of righteousness.
ETS: Yes, whoosh. That was sort of the whole point; I wouldn’t have thought I would ever laugh at a thing like that, but it slayed me.
So, it’s a nice picture of Piglet and Pooh examining some footprints. Adding the caption makes it look like Piglet just kicked Pooh in the genitals. Pooh and Piglet are sweet gentle nonsexual cartoon animals and it’s not clear that they even have genitals, and even if they do, they would never ever no never! kick each other in them. It’s outrageous so it’s funny!
I think the most I ever laughed at a TV show was when I was watching an episode of Fawlty Towers. Basil and Manuel were trying to sneak a dead body out of the hotel unnoticed, but one of the elderly women tenants saw them and started screaming. Basil punched her and knocked her out. I laughed so hard, I broke the wooden chair I was sitting in and collapsed to the floor.
Another biggest laugh episode occurred when I used to work in a print shop. One of the salesmen, an old-school southerner with a genteel accent, would come down and chat with my boss for a while and shoot the breeze. They started talking about golf courses, and I started up the press. After a few minutes, I shut it down and heard the salesman say in a conspiratorial voice:
“Ah heard they were gonna start letting JEWS in theyuh.”
I burst out laughing like a loon. I was doubled over in pain. I looked up and saw the two of them looking back at me like I was crazy. I started the machine back up and pretended I didn’t hear the Jew hater.
There’s the old thing from the UK, about the historical episode of the Spanish Armada. According to popular lore, when news came that the Armada was approaching England, Sir Francis Drake and his associates were playing bowls on the famous tract of land close by his base at Plymouth, called Plymouth Hoe. With extreme aplomb and “cool”, Sir F. insisted that they finish the game, making a remark to the effect that there was plenty of time to do that, and to see the unwelcome visitors off as well. (It’s thought that in actual fact, weather and tide conditions right at that time were such that the English ships couldn’t get out of harbour; so the guys might as well carry on with what they were doing already.)
Hence the school-kid’s “howler” in his history essay: “When the Armada arrived, Sir Francis Drake was on Plymouth Hoe, playing with his bowels.” A couple of weeks after I’d first heard about this juvenile mis-wording; I was visiting relatives, and decided to pass this comic item on to them. It so came about that when attempting to tell them the “funny”, I found it almost “hysterically” comical – to the point that for a couple of minutes, I was laughing helplessly, to the point of being unable to get the words out coherently. Can only ascribe it to my life having been somewhat stressful at that period of time – over-reaction seeking relief from tension or some such – because the thing isn’t that funny.
That’s the worst, when you finally get it out and there’s a vaguely pitying non-reaction from your audience. :o
Yeah, I got that much without any confusion.
None of that set of notions crossed my mind at any time before reading your post.
The combo of the tone of the attributed statement from Pooh (including the reassurance that he’s fine) plus the body language of both characters in the cartoon sort of fit with “Piglet accidentally kicked Pooh in the balls” (probably while playing some sports game or something), which doesn’t seem inconsistent with sweet gentle cartoon characters.
Oh well, no joke, no matter how funny, tends to survive the process of being explained. I can sort of see how it could seem funny to you given the stream-of-consciousness you had, so I appreciate the effort.
Meanwhile, for my own part, there was the time that my brilliant nuclear-physicist dad came back to the campsite after an unsuccessful hour of fly fishing. He’d found a piece of paper trash that some inconsiderate camper had left, and, being cute, had impaled it on the hook, as in “here’s what I managed to catch”. So after drawing our attention to this silly cuteness, he proceeded to walk over to the campfire and dangle the trash into the flames. Whereupon the nylon fishing line instantly melted and his royal coachman fly and the trash plummetted into the flames.
I probably would have stopped laughing sooner if it hasn’t been for the indignant facial expression it evoked.