[QUOTE=Marlitharn]
No…and I don’t know anyone who thought that was funny.
Now if that story had had a happy ending, and the meth-heads had been found, I would imagine the operators involved would have had a few relieved chuckles over how hard it was to get good information out of those two bozos. But as it was…no, not funny at all.
[/QUOTE]
Oh, well, I didn’t think it was funny either. Just didn’t realize that people doing stuff in trees is a common hallucination, which it apparently is. No offense meant.
On that note, I busted a gut when the Bunkers on All in the Family got a swastika painted on their front door. It was just the opening scene: Archie opens the front door, the audience sees the swastika and howls with laughter, Archie picks up the paper, closes the door, gets a “Huh?” look, opens the door again and the audience screams again. Then later, on the phone to the cops, he describes it as “one a dem Goiman things from Woild War Two.”
I was on the floor, redfaced and gasping, and my mom pitched a fit when she found out what I was laughing at. Later, though, my dad told me that sometimes people laugh when they don’t know what else to do. And at that time (mid-70s, I was watching a rerun) the Holocaust was still a very, very taboo subject in the US. Even at that age, I had a vague sense of what that symbol meant, so it was the shock of seeing it in such a mundane situation that knocked me sideways. Well, that plus the fact that Carroll O’Connor’s comic timing was just that good.
So I can understand why you laughed, because who among us really took in the scope of the tower falling right when it was happening? Especially if you tuned in shortly before it happened and didn’t have time to absorb the image of the towers on fire. An iconic building disintegrating before your eyes. You either laugh or cry, so you laughed.