Back when I was a lad, I was dropping off the then future Mrs Libarian back at her car after a long night of we-just-met-and-are-still-trying-to-impress-each-other-sex.
As she was getting out, my future wife looked at me coyly, gave me a soft kiss on the cheek, flipped her hair, then stepped down and slipped on the ice and fell UNDER the truck. I had a large SUV at the time, and she was wedged so firmly between the icy ground and the running boards that I actually had to get out and help dislodge her.
There was absolutely no force on the planet that could make me stop laughing. She made me promise to forget it. I lied.
I saw Dunham on his Spark of Insanity tour in Ft. Wayne, IN. He didn’t use Marvin, instead he said everyone was asking what happened to Bubba J., so he brought Bubba out for his encore. He pulled out a piece of paper and said he hadn’t been practicing, so he needed a cheat sheet of the act.
After about 3 lines, Bubba looked at Jeff and said it sounded like someone else was saying his lines with him. Jeff told him it did sound like it, but if the audience wanted to, they could go right ahead. So we did. When Jeff forgot what was next, we gave him his line. Bubba J looked at him and said, “Pretty sad when the audience knows the routine better than you do.” We had him cracking up on stage. It was a good show.
I hesitated to share this with you all, because now you have proof that I have a very low entertainment threshhold. I’ve gotten hooked on this show called “MXC” shown on Spike TV. It’s a Japanese reality show that pits groups of people against each other in quasi-athletic competitions such as obstacle courses, 40 yard dashes, mud wrestling, etc. The humor part comes in with a couple of American hosts who narrate the show, overloading the commentary with snarky comments and some truly inspired insults. It’s all I can do not to spit out my iced tea through my nose when those two guys really get going.
Also, I like the groin kicking scenes. High comedy, there.
My weakness is when people almost fall and do everything to prevent it. They end up looking more ridiculous than if they had just let themselves fall.
This happened 15 years ago, but is still classic. My husband and I took my Mother-in-law out for her birthday. She loves miniature golf, and there was a new place she wanted to try. This place was a little more hilly than most. It was also packed. This other party was right on our heels and being kind of impatient with us because my MIL was recovering from foot surgery, and not able to move as quickly as they thought she should. We had descended some steps and were at the next hole, when these buttheads finished the previous hole and the guy decided he didn’t need any steps and he was just going to walk down the hill. But, something went terribly wrong with his plan, and he started doing this kind of side-stepping hopping thing down the hill and trying to balance himself with his golf club in both hands. I immediately thought of Michigan J. Frog minus the top hat.
You know when you’re the only one laughing at something, and everybody else is looking at you like you crawled out of a dog’s butt? * That* is the second funniest thing ever.
People who fail at life in the midst of trying to be mean is the funniest thing ever to me. I still laugh when I remember this and it was 10 years ago, or perhaps more.
In high school I had a boyfriend with a large, substantial mohawk. I’m walking downtown with him and a bunch of our friends. This bratty kid of about 12 or 13 drives by on her bike, staring at him and sneering. She turns her head to stare and looks back at him with the most disgusted look ever…
… and runs smack into a telephone pole and falls off her bike.
One of my friends cracks up laughing, and another friend, the nice one, of us admonishes her for laughing. “TheREsa!” Then turns to the kid: “Are you okay?”
She gets up and sneers “Nice haaairrrr!” In that voice… you know the one.
So my other friend, a guy who had been quiet up to this point, says, “You just ran into a pole.” The most deadpan, matter-of-fact voice ever. She got back on her bike and rode away without a word, as we all laughed.
I could not have designed a more ideal comedy gold scenario for myself, right down to the responses of my friends. It was just truly great.
Watching people have something sticky pulled from their bodies. Being a witness to the removal of tape, bandaids, leg wax, chest electrode, etc–especially from a hairy arm or leg–always gives me a huge laugh. It’s always best when they tell you to pull it quickly so it won’t hurt so much. Yeah, right–a rocket launcher couldn’t make them jump any higher!
Jeff Dunham is comedy GOLD. On top of that, he’s a really super nice guy.
I had booked him to be the entertainment a couple of years ago at a big event the company I used to work for puts on every two years in Tahoe. Had a nice chat with him about living and working in Vegas. He’s just a peach. Cute, too!
I’d like to hang out with him again.
Absolutely. Even if things go the opposite way than in Idiocracy and we become a civilization of sophisticated and omnipotent human animals, I’m supremely confident we’ll STILL be busting up laughing over some guy taking a shot to the nuts.
All these descriptions of falling have made me start quietly but uncontrollably cracking up here at work. I didn’t even know they got to me that much!
Other than that I subscribe to the comedy school of non-sequiturs, from inserting the wrong word to Engrish to misheard lyrics (look up ‘Buffalax’ on YouTube - it was never quite as funny after the first time, but the “Benny Lava” video made me laugh so much I was really afraid I was going to die from lack of oxygen for a minute) to that “crystal fusiliers” blooper on the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and all the delights in between.
This. I didn’t know it had a word – corpsing – but this is indeed the funniest thing that has ever happened anywhere. This improv scene in particular is the ultimate demonstration of how funny corpsing is. Carol Burnette knows from experience that Tim Conway is one of the funniest people on the planet, and you can actually see in her eyes that she knows she cannot win. You watch them try so hard to pull it together, with Conway sort of basking in his ability to reduce three professional actors to fits of giggles in the middle of the performance… and then at the end… ‘‘Are you sure that asshole’s through?’’
When you have three of four actors on a stage collapse onto the goddamn floor pounding their fists into the ground because they can’t handle the sheer hilarity of it all, this is comedy gold.
The word ‘‘SNORKIE’’ is a regular part of my vocabulary, by the way. But I can’t do it quite like Tim Conway.
MXC is awesome. I have the first two seasons on DVD. Gotta love Vic, Kenny, Guy LeDouche, Captain Tenneal, and all their little helper monkeys.
One thing I really like about it is that, apart from the title (“Most Extreme Elimination Challenge”, in full), they go out of their way to avoid making “Japanese” jokes during the show. It’d be really easy to write a bunch of, “Ha ha, those Japanese sure are crazy!” jokes, but they put more effort into it than that.
Probably my favorite part of the show is the stuff contestants shout out before their attempts at the various dangerous stunts they have them do. I got a good laugh out of one I remember well; a dour-faced man was going on the Rotating Surfboard of Death, and before he jumped on, they dubbed in a voice saying gravely, “I intend to be successful!”
Y’know when you can almost foresee the outcome of something, but it turns out even better?
A bunch guys are camping. We’ve cleared out some trees to enlarge the campsite. One tree was about 4 inches in diameter. It was then cut into about 4-foot lengths.
A guy we call Polish decided that the logs were too long for the campfire, so he decided to break them in half.
Green wood, mind you.
He laid two of the pieces about 3 feet apart, parallel. He laid another across the middle…sort of forming a wide “H” pattern. Using the fourth piece, he stood at the base of the H and gave a mightly downward swing.
The rebound smacked him square in the face, and he did a backwards, spread-eagle collapse. Then, lying there, he says, “Uggh.”
Now picture half a dozen guys strewn about laughing their damn fool heads off. We all had an idea of what was to come, but Polish’s dismount style and his delayed grunt murdered me.
Mine’s kind of specific. When people get the name for an object mixed up, but have a sense of humor about it, and then references are made to it in the future, especially when the originally person who misspoke doesn’t get the reference at first. The longer amount of time it goes on, the funnier it gets. An example to illustrate what the hell I’m talking about:
Five years ago, I had purchased a fresh pineapple at the grocery store. It was sitting on top of the refrigerator. My sister, who is very intelligent, but at the same time delightfully airheaded, walked into the kitchen and said, “oooh, a coconut!” It’s been a constant source of amusement ever since. The funniest moment, however, came last week when we were telling our mom about it, as she’d never heard the story. We all laughed, the subject was changed, and later on we started talking about Spongebob Squarepants. The lyrics to the theme song go, “who lives in a pineapple under the sea? SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS!” I sing, “Who lives in a coconut under the sea?” and my sister totally misses it and yells, “SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS!” and I just about fall off my chair I’m laughing so hard. Melissa says, “what’s so funny?” and we all laugh harder.
Definitely a “you had to be there” sort of humor, though.
I also appreciate a good non sequitur. Only good ones, though, if it’s obvious they’re trying too hard, it’s just annoying.
My favorite appeared frequently in Penthouse Forum anal sex stories where they’d repeatedly use the word “rosebud” as a euphemism for “anus”. Possibly the most disparate euphemism I’ve ever seen.
