Eh. If you’re there with a guide who’s telling you it’s fine, it doesn’t seem that dumb to listen to them. There’s a reasonable expectation they have that job because they know what they’re doing, and we’re used to trusting professionals- hell I’ve let someone cut me open and take bits of me out because they were in a white labcoat and someone told me they’d done it before.
The guide’s the fucking moron, not the tourists.
Anyway back to the thread- I find most horribly offensive jokes funny, whether I’ll admit it or not. Unless there’s someone present who gets reasonably upset, then the funny evaporates. If they get unreasonably upset, it kind of makes it funnier.
Co-workers in cubicles near me who swallow drinks or food the wrong way and go into choking/coughing fits. I know this makes me a horrible person, but this coupled with the fact that I try not to let them hear me laughing, nearly kills me to the point that I usually have to leave to go somewhere “safe” where I can laugh out loud for a few minutes. Sometimes when I come back, if I hear them clearing their throat, it starts me up and I have to leave again.
Mine’s pretty morbid; I sometimes have trouble not laughing when I see someone in a TV show or movie land after jumping or falling off a building. Seeing someone actually step or fall off the top of the building is tense and frightening, but the landing is funny to me. (To be clear, the idea of this happening to anyone in real life terrifies me; it’s just media’s portrayal of the result that I find funny.)
I think it’s because landing at high speed strikes me as such a horrible and messy way to die, but on TV it’s always so clean. A person who lands after falling from 100 feet should be going about 55 miles per hour when they hit bottom (I could be off, I just ran the numbers quickly) but on TV they usually look like they just walked over to the spot where they landed, laid down and died. No part of their body is bent unnaturally or obviously broken. The look on their face is always so blank and peaceful that there’s not sign of the fear or surprise I would expect. If there’s any blood its usually only a little, like a trickle from the corner of the mouth or something. There might be a spreading pool of blood, but if there is it will usually spread in all directions evenly for some reason, as though all sidewalls and streets are perfectly level and the body is somehow bleeding evenly in every direction at once. It all clashes so badly with what the gruesome image I would expect that I can’t help but find it funny.
Hmm, never saw this one, thanks. To be fair, if you watch the entire thing from the beginning you kind of expect someone to take a coconut to the dome sooner or later.
We visited my girlfriend’s cousins before Christmas. Bob held out his hand for his 4-year-old son to “gimme five.” After a couple of times, the boy held both hands high above his head so he could hit his dad’s hand as hard as he could, and Bob yanked his hand away at the last second. The boy’s momentum caused him to fall flat on his face.
Meh. Jesus, Buddha, and Zeus could have showed up and said it was cool. You couldn’t have gotten me out of that car with dynamite. I’ve been told that I have trust issues.
It slays me to see a little kid accidentally let go of a helium balloon. It’s just so inevitable. Every time I see a kid with a balloon, I surreptitiously keep an eye on them because I know that any moment now…yep! There it goes!
There was an article in the Vegas paper years ago that had me rolling.
Two Ice Cream truck drivers were brawling on the street. They both had names with about 15 letters and 5 vowels between them. They were duking it out over a turf war!
There’s this fanfiction writer (I’ll protect her privacy by not giving you her name.) She writes really bad fanfiction, mostly about real-life straight people, who are gay couples in her fanfictions. This, combined with the fact that she has a unique and very bad writing style (capitalizing most words and usually putting each sentence as its own paragraph), makes me laugh so much!
I know, the fanfiction was written sincerely, and I shouldn’t laugh at it, but it’s just so unintentionally funny.
There’s an off-ramp in Calgary that has a sign on it that says,
SLOW
DOWN
NOW
!
It curves up and around and people can’t see the stopped traffic in front of them until it’s too late. I guess the roads people got tired of all the carnage there.
I have a tendency to laugh/smile inappropriately - apparently it runs in my family, because if one of my sisters and I catch each other’s eyes, self-control is over for both of us.
I blew my friend’s cat over. I happened to be blowing out a candle just as she was walking behind it. She fell over. She just went down on her side with her little legs still moving. She was a very silly cat, not at an elegant mysterious creature and we all loved her dearly.
Stop by some time. We have a “slow” dog that’ll start out standing straight and tall, and we say to guests “Just waaaaaiiiit…” And sure enough, his legs start to spread, a little at first, and more, and faster, and before you know it Ker-THUNK! And then he tries to get up but he’s really just swimming.
At the fire academy, there’s a building we call the burn building. It’s a concrete structure where instructors set fire to bales of hay so firefighters-in-training can practice putting them out.
A few weeks ago, a stray cat was in the burn building when they started setting fires. The cat tore out of the place. Usually when I see a cat running, he’s chasing after a bird or something, but this cat was literally running for his life, and the panic and urgency that was evident in his “cat sprint” made me and everyone standing around me burst out laughing.
Ninth grade wood shop, the instructor was demonstrating the use of an oscillating-spindle sander. If you’ve never seen one, here’s a video. A spindle about 2" in diameter and a foot long spins at a few hundred RPM on a vertical axis. You slide your workpiece around on the horizontal table, using the spindle to sand all the nooks and crannies on the edge of your workpiece. The spindle moves up and down in a cyclic manner to make use of more of the abrasive surface instead of just constantly grinding on one part of it.
So you can see this coming. A bunch of ninth grade boys, and here’s this dick-shaped thing moving up and down in a rather salacious manner. A bunch of us started laughing, and just couldn’t help ourselves. The instructor was severely annoyed with us.
Similarly, sometimes I find gospel singers funny, but only when they’re obviously really, really into the music, and when the songs themselves have really cheesy lyrics.
Once in the winter I saw a small child - about 2 or so - toddling down the sidewalk all dressed up in a snowsuit, scarf, hat, mittens - she looked like an adorable puffy walking star. I was thinking about how cute this kid looked and then she tripped and fell flat on her face and started crying. For some reason that struck me as hilarious - her parents picked her up and she was fine of course - but I had to duck into a store because I was laughing so hard.
Oh dear! It requires the appropriate “throat plate,” too. A bobbing spindle in a throat plate… I don’t know if I would have been beet red or doubled over (or both).
