Sometimes, for no apparent reason you find something that is normally mildly amusing absolutely hilarious. And you can’t stop laughing. What is the most inappropriate / embarrassing situation this has happened to you?
I managed to “get the giggles” at my Granddad’s second funeral. (There was one in England, then one in his native Ireland). I was right at the front and something my brother said set me off laughing. I had to hide behind a prayer book for several minutes. Whoops!
I had one not quite as embarassing as that at my first wife’s funeral, except this was at the wake and not the service.
My wife was Catholic and a friend of mine was telling a joke about how some young girl wanted to get a crucifix to wear (even though she wasn’t Catholic herself) so she went to the Catholic bookstore and asked the nun behind the counter to see one. The nun could tell the girl was not from that parish so she handed her a plain cross pendant. The young customer asked, “Do you have one with the little man on it?”
Somehow, even thought the joke wasn’t all that funny, the idea of the friend telling it there at the wake got me laughing so hard I had to go outside.
I can’t think of an example off the top of my head, but I love it when you start to giggle and can’t stop. high school was always good for that. It also happens alot when I see someone I know fall over or bump into something, they are in pain and I’m standing there holding in a gigle.
There’s an episode of coupling that talks about the “giggle loop”, where you think of something funny but know it would be inappropriate to laugh – which makes you want to laugh even more, which makes you see the inappropriateness of it, which increases your desire – nay, need – to laugh…
I watched that episode today.
Gee, wonder what reminded me of the funeral incident?
Oh, here’s an example. I was taking a film class in college. Not a very good class. The first semester was like: “You will watch these films and then make one of your own. If you don’t have access to a movie camera, then make a slide show. If you don’t have access to a 35mm still camera, you may write a report.” Okay, it wasn’t that bad; but it was the first time the school had offered a filmmaking class. Three of us attended and “advanced” class that was combined with the class we had just finished. And therein hangs the tale…
There was a girl whose subject was animals that she had rescued. She presented it as a slide show. Narration was done using an ancient 1/4" reel-to-reel tape recorder that would speed up and slow down without pattern. She came to a slide of a toy poodle that she had rescued, and the tape played “Here is a poem I wrote for Fifi. ‘My poor little dog Fifi, with blood dripping from her neck…’” – all the time increasing and decreasing pitch. Aside from the maudlin subject matter and the presentation, plus the fact that this girl wrote a really bad poem to the injured dog (not that the dog’s injuries were funny), there was that damned tape player as well!
There were two doors to the room we were using. I was in the middle of the room, trapped on the opposite side of a long table. It was torture! The more I tried to stifle the laugh, the more it needed to come out. Some of it escaped through my nose. The instructor was glaring at me. My friends could see my predicament (and also found the girl’s presentation hilarious) and they had to keep from laughing.
Boy, was I glad to get out and away from that room! I laughed and laughed and laughed!
“Stop playing Reservoir Dogs!”
I’m going to have to pop in the DVD.
Jeez, Johnny! I was laughing out loud as I read that!
… about the presentation, that is.
I’m a bit slow on the draw it seems.
hee hee hee!
I think I may have to watch it again aswell!
VERY funny story about the presentation.
I like British comedies so much, I think I’ll have to find a British girlfriend. I like the episode where Sally is wondering about Patrick’s “size”.
“'Scuse me, girls. I seem to have a little balance problem!”
(Sorry for the hijack, but I love that show. Can’t wait for Season 2 to come out on DVD.)
I have a fairly recent one.
My kids are past the baby stage, so we don’t really watch a lot of Sponge Bob.
There’s a car commercial that starts out with a heavy drum beat, then goes into two children watching Spongebob on the tv in the minivan.
I couldn’t understand what the theme was, so my children told me,
“Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?”
“SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS!”
“Absorbent and yellow and porous is he!”
For some reason, this last line just gave me the giggle fits. I couldn’t stop laughing and my children kept shouting it out the line and I would laugh even harder.
I have no idea why it struck me funny. I also got the giggle fits at Denny’s when the waitress brought a bunch of marachino cherries for my children, and out of the blue, my daughter trilled, “Cherries in a bowl!”
Do you know how embarrassing it is, trying to stifle screaming laughter into a paper napkin, while your husband looks at you like you just lost your mind?
Last time it happened to me was about 20 years ago (damn, I must have gotten old and crotchety).
Anyway, it was in “Tech School” for the Air Force and we were being taught about fueling aircraft.
For some reason, when the instructor explained to us the proper care of fueling equipment and he said “roll out your hoses and check for cracks and abrasions” it struck about half the class as hysterical, and it took a good 10 minutes for the laughter and giggles (I was the only girl) to die down.
He, the instructor, was NOT amused. Particularly since, for the rest of the day, every once in a while someone would snort, or half laugh (you know the drill) remembering it.
Was pretty embarrassing as he kept giving us all dirty looks.
I was talking to a co-worker one time about a security briefing I attended. (I used to work in the aerospace industry.) I told her that the meeting was very dry. As I sat in it, I had the urge to let out a “Quack!” Of course I couldn’t. That started the Giggle Loop.
After telling this story to my co-worker, now she gets the urge to start quacking at boring meetings.
Giggle Loop.
When I was a tech for a major long-distance carrier, they rolled out a major advertising campaign for some high-tech proposition, and sent a selection of us for training, a total of weeks of it. And it was so high-profile that a couple of HQ types were taking the training, too, including a tight-a**ed colonel-of-reserves decision-maker who had never done our job, and didn’t know how experienced techs thought.
We were all very conscientious about it, but huge amounts of it weren’t going to be our responsibility–network design, the kind of config that would be done remotely by the controller group, remote monitoring issues, purchase choices, etc etc. And then the instructor mentioned in passing that the fan filters needed to be cleaned once a month. There was this CRASH of laughter as all of us instantly knew our place in the project. (It didn’t help that the last equipment we had to clean filters on, was some thoroughly obsolete X.25 switches.)
And the laughing continued, and the colonel was looking around to see everyone laughing, and pretending to get the joke with a fake-looking smile, and it just went on and on.
Not a giggle, a roar, we had’m outnumbered. That was a great bunch to be with.
This just happened last week whilst we went to watch a snooker tournament (most of the big-name players were playing, by the way). We were invited to the tourny by a snooker-keen friend, and there were three of us not-keen-on-snooker guys, but we went anyway.
It was perhaps the longest six hours of my life.
Anyway, we were well into hour four of library-like silence when someone behind us ripped a medium-sized, wet, bubbly and a disgustingly egg-reeking fart. :eek: Oh boy, I knew from that moment that we were done. We were cramping from laughter over the next half-hour. The four of us had to cover our faces and pinch our lips closed whilst giggling our asses off. We were pretty worried because one of my friends is a notorious snorter, and we knew that once taht goes off we’d either be kicked out or voluntarily walk out of the hall to avoid further embarassment. But luckily he didn’t.
Not so surprisingly, though, (we were pretty much the only foreigners there, except the players, of course) not one other person in the audience found it even remotely funny and we got dirty looks the rest of the way. And I don’t think we caught the players’ attention.
At the end, though, we managed to giggle six-packs onto ourselves.
When I worked for the Air Force, I had a project to design a small park and the accompanying irrigation system and water supply. I installed a floating pump at a nearby golf course pond and had to bore the supply line under a railroad and 4-lane highway. The permitting process took nearly a year, and used every last dime of the $200k we were allotted. It was impossible for us to get any more money for the project.
The contractor finished the project, and the crowning moment arrived: the activation of the pump. The contractor turned it on, and in the park, the water sprinklers I had spec’d, (irrigation radius: 60 ft) looked more like an in-ground water fountain. The water wasn’t even going five feet.
Horror-struck, I ran through every design calculation again. I checked all the head losses, the pump rating curve, the sprinkler head specs. Everything checked. It should be working, but it wasn’t! Why! WHY!?!
Now to tell the boss. :eek:
As a coping measure. I had been joking about the problem with a coworker just before seeing my boss. A mistake, as I ended up with a fit of giggles. As I sat in the chair in his office, the more I tried to talk about the problem, the more I giggled, and the more I giggled, the more I knew how wrong it was to be giggling, which only made it worse. I was stuck in a giggle feedback loop. As I sat in that chair, my face red, tears streaming down my cheeks, my body convulsing with laughter, I tried to talk with my boss:
Me: gigglesnort*…and it’s not…giggle …not working… hehegiggle* …and I don’t… hehehe …don’t know why! gigglegiggle
Boss: You do know this is serious, right?
Me: gigglehehehegiggle Y–yes!! It’s a completed disaster! Bwa-ha-ha-ha
Not a crowning moment in my career.
–Patch
During boring classes, I used to have a bad habit of mentally picturing the scene that would ensue if a student decided to relieve the torpor by faking an epileptic fit. For some reason this always seemed much funnier than it should, and I would end up giggling for reasons that were totally inexplicable to my classmates. But least I managed to resist the urge to actually do it.
When I was 12 I was with a friend and his mother, who was very impatient with a lot of things and she seldom laughed and had virtually no sense of humor. His mother had picked up a salad at the supermarket. The container, which was rather flimsy, was held shut by a rubber band. When we got out into the parking lot the lid on the salad had come off and the rubber band didn’t do much to hold it. As his mother picked up the container there were pieces of lettuce, mushrooms, etc. spilling into the cart and onto the ground. His mom was swearing and grumbling about the poor quality of the containers the store used. The whole scene was so funny, but knowing my friend’s mom, I didn’t dare let her see me laughing at her situation.
When I was 21 I was riding with another friend in his pickup. We had just pulled out of the McDonald’s drive-through. He set his french fry carton on the dash. Already I was suppressing my laughter knowing what was going to happen. Sure enough, when he turned the corner his fries spilled out of the carton and onto the dash. He started cussing and he scooped up the fries. He still left them on the dashboard. He turned another corner and it happened AGAIN! It took all I had to keep from laughing out loud. I kept my head turned the other way as I pretended to admire the “scenery” going by, which I had already seen a million times or so.
Lastly, there was a time I was at a piano concert. During a quiter passage my mind drifted and I thought of a joke I had heard earlier that day. I thought about getting up and going to the restroom just so I could get it out of my system.
This happened in church 25 years ago.
We had a choir that was pretty good with one exception: Patty Jones (not real name) whose father was also in the choir. He had a great voice, sadly the talent wasn’t passed on. Her voice would break glass and make dogs howl.
Anyway, our pastor would walk up and down the aisle near the service end and solicit prayer requests. People would shout out things like “pray for our boys overseas” or “pray for Aunt Joan’s appendectomy”.
My friend Mark says “pray for singing lessons for Patty Jones”.
You could hear a small titter in the congregation (those close enough to hear Mark. Even the pastor had a smirk. I had to bite the flesh of my thumb to keep from exploding. Slowly the tears appeared but I would not succumb!
After the service I wanted to strangle Mark!