“Clockwork Smurf”? Wasn’t that a Kubrick/Bakshi collaboration?
-Ben
I saw a home video shot by a friend of mine in which his father in law is officiating over a Christmas morning. All he’s wearing is a robe, but you can’t tell until he moves a certain way and his nut sack flops out. My buddy plays this video for everyone who visits, and the first time I saw it I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe. I laughed for hours. I literally couldn’t stop.
Larry Walters.
You’ve probably heard of him. He’s the guy who, in 1982, tied 45 helium-filled weather balloons to a lawn chair, expecting to drift around at a height of about 30 feet. Instead, he ended up at 16,000 feet and smack in the middle of the approach corridor for LAX.
Well, when I told my friend at work about Larry, we started wondering about the radio conversation between the control tower and the first pilot to spot Larry.
pilot:“Control, this is Delta flight 245 from Chicago, uhh… there’s a guy up here in a lawn chair.”
tower:“There’s a passenger in the cockpit?”
pilot:“Uhh… no.”
Seriously, you’re flying a 747, and you look out the window to see some schmuck in a lawn chair bobbing around at 16,000 feet waving at you, how are you going to react?
We were both laughing so hard we didn’t get anything done for the rest of the day.
–sublight.
July 2 is Larry Walters Day.
I’ve had many a hard-laughing moment watching MST3K and Space Ghost Coast to Coast, but the moment I’ll always treasure is:
Sitting in the bathroom at my best friend’s house, doing what guys do when they’re sitting in a bathroom. Reading material was a book called The Odd Index - perfect sit-down bathroom reading, and I recommend it. It’s a bunch of strange lists, nothing more. The strange list I was reading happened to be euphemisms for “erection”. I chuckled at a few I’d never heard, then skimmed quickly over “girl-o-meter”. Read a few more, then my brain kicked in and I realized why that was amusing. I started to laugh out loud, just a little, then gradually more and more. Then I wondered what someone might think if they were walking by the bathroom door, hearing me laughing heartily inside, which REALLY set me off, and of course it just went to hell from there. It turns out nobody had happened to be in the hallway outside during my little episode, but I told everyone about it later, and it was much appreciated.
The scene: A politically correct movie theater
The movie: Groucho Marx and …
The people: My high school buddies.
First, the intermission. We were watching a Marx Brothers’ movie at the Berkeley YMCA. The mad fools decide to put on “Tricia Nixon’s Gay Wedding” between features. We’re listening to earnest politically correct mother explain to her six year old what’s going on. But that was later.
Earlier that same night we were seated at the Y, seeing Night at the Opera, or thereabouts. The Y people, not being too astute about public events, have crammed the folding chairs so close they touch. The next row is near enough that my knees poke the next person’s butt, if I’m not careful. But that’s ok, because the audience is in a great mood, and the movie hits the spot. A good number of people laughing loud as they can. So they thought.
A couple rows up a woman needs to leave in mid-movie to go to the powder and have-a-quick-one room. She stands carefully, but the next person feels the need to get up, too, to make way for her, and tips over their chair. “Whoops, sorry! Let me help you with that!” First woman bends over. Then we notice that things are collapsing in the movie, too. Laughs and other sounds getting bigger, now. As a third person struggles to get the first chair off the ground, they knock over their own chair, being in a hurry. Now people can see there’s a problem brewing, so a lot of people stand up to help. Many more chairs knocked down. Then the first people start hitting the deck. Others trying to help them up. Chaos from the Marx Brothers on the screen. More chairs falling over. People sitting on the floor laughing uncontrollable.
Yep, I’d pay to see that movie just one more time at the Y.
I remember laughing pretty hard the first time I read in The Prehistory of the Far Side the mixups between The Far Side and Denis the Menace.
and I think it’s usually just the mood I happen to be in. It’s tough to make me laugh at all, unfortunately. I am a seriously difficult audience.
But one time that pops to mind was when I read ** The Onion’s “Mother Theres Sent to Hell in Wacky Afterlife Mixup” ** I know, sounds awful, and it was. But I was laughing so hard I almost vomited. Especially when I tried to read it out loud to someone else over the phone.
I don’t know if you can find it in the archives. I have a copy of it on my drive somewhere…
stoid
Best ever Calvin & Hobbes was the one which begins with a miniaturised Calving desperately leaping from key to key on his mother’s typewriter, trying to alert someone to his predicament. Last frame has his mother finding it and angrily demanding “Who wrote ‘help I’m a bug’ on my letter to grandma?” Calvin walking past with a blankly, openly thoughtful expression: “Evidently some bug. How strange.”
I think it’s his expression that set me off but then I got into the logic of his conclusion, the mindset of an 8 year-old, etc…
I’m not usually in favour of drugs but once after one of my very first joints I saw a British comedy team called Fist of fun on telly - they had a guest actor come on pretending to be crap British kids’ puppeteer Rod Hull. He was dressed bizarrely in wig and jacket, and had a plastic arm hanging loosely at his side (logically, because his puppet was a bird called Emu that meant his arm was never seen). He then went on about how much he liked jelly, and when someone tried to guide the conversation, he got realy furiously angry and started shrieking about how he loved jelly more than anyone could understand, as a man loves a woman. I laughed like I was… well, on drugs. For one moment I understood Bill Hicks’ assertion that he had a great time on drugs.
The rest of my hash experiences were a sea of paranoid barrenness, spent trying to regain that first laughter. there is a spiritual gift of laughter, too, which brings almost uncontrollable laughter in entire congregations. Many see it as mass emotionalism, others as a waste of energy… but I’d kinda like to get it sometime. Laughter is really, really good.
Mine is quite simple. As they usually are. I was about 12, and my dad told me about my uncle’s school essay. It apparently started with two sentences. “When I grow up, I want to be Tarzan. I’ll kill 100 lions and eat them all.”
At that point, it was point of no return. I just lost it for about 15 minutes and had to sit very very still with no-one talking about anything ot control it. Even now, talking about that episode brings a hearty smile upon my face.
Here’s mine:
My roomate works at the local middle school directing the drama club. So, on opening night, a whole bunch of us go to see the play (something designed for middle school with a play within a play). Anyway, in the play within the play, one of the characters is a soldier and blacks out. He wakes up at the hospital and asks the nurse what happened. He gets this reply:
“your unit was cut off.”
To which we all start to giggle a bit and make faces. Then, his soldier buddies arrive and say:
“we got here as soon as we could, but our units were cut off.”
At which point we probably pissed off every parent there by turning red and squirming around trying (and failing) not to make too much noise. The best part is that nobody involved with the production had picked up on it; 20-odd middle school kids and a couple college students, and nobody noticed till we fell out of our chairs.
That is goddam funny! Funeral humor gets me every time.
My mother tells a story about when she was a teen, and she and some friends went to a funeral (I forget who’s). When they get there, one of her friends says “OK, wake him up! We’re here!” They had to leave…
The first funeral I went to was my great grand-father’s, and I was something like ten years old. We were driving in the funeral procession to the graveside services, and we passed under a very high bridge. My dad says something to me like, “look how high that bridge is! I bet anything could pass under it!” Then I said “yeah, anything except Dolly Parton on her back!”. I guess that was pretty funny coming from a child, because my parents were laughing hysterically the whole trip to the grave.
“I see your skull… On a shelf… In a museum…”
Yeah, that one got me too.
When I was 18, our family of seven had a guest with us for dinner. Sister Barb was from our Catholic Church, and was very casual and easy to talk to. The conversation revolved around what Sister did, and the details of how she delivered the communion waffers to shut-ins around town. Mom had explained to us that the waffers, in their blessed state were the equivelent of Christ, and had to be handled appropriately. My 16 year old brother Charlie got into a rapidfire line of questioning that got sillier and sillier.
Charlie: Do you keep Jesus in a car seat in your car?
Sister Barb: No.
Charlie: Do you have to put a seat belt on Him?
Sister Barb: No!
Charlie: Does Jesus go in the trunk, in a special box?
Sister Barb: No!
Charlie: Do you keep Jesus on the dashboard, sliding back and forth?
Sister Barb: No!
Charlie: Do you hold Jesus like you hold a Slurpee from 7-11?
Sister Barb: Huh?
Charlie: You know, between your legs, do you “crotch” Jesus?
We all turned red, then started snorting, giggling, and laughing uncontrollably as we cringed in embarrasment. My mother screamed “Did you say ‘crotch Jesus?’” Charlie could only laugh at himself as he repeatedly gasped “Crotch Jesus!” Sister Barb saw some humor in it and laughed, which let us off the hook, and we laughed unrestrained. I became so weak that I could not sit up, and slid under the table. Tears were streeming down our cheeks and most of us were unable to speak for the rest of the night.
Sister Barb never came back.
I cannot pass a 7-11 or hold a drink between my legs without thinking of “crotching Jesus,”
This happened a couple months ago when I was in Leeds for a football tournament (well ostensibly for a football tournament, we actually spent most of our time drinking, which will become apparent very shortly).
Someone’s random comment got myself and several of my friends (all over from Ireland) joking about the surname Magee. “Gee”, you see, is Irish slang for “vagina”, so when you say the name out loud it sounds like you’re saying “my vagina”. So in the bar after the tournament ended we all started trying to think of the funniest first name a person surnamed Magee could have. Pat Magee, Phil Magee, Mark Magee, etc. By the time we left the bar we’d run out of real names so we started just reading the names of businesses we passed by in the taxi back to the hotel. Most of these really made no sense in context (Thomas Cook Magee?) but in our drunken state they were all absolutely hilarious. Then we passed by a shop called Aladdin and, well, it just wasn’t going to get any funnier than that. I’m sure the driver couldn’t wait to get these Irish lunatics out of his cab 
Imagine 4 20-something women sitting around a table playing cards. Add to that a little bit of alcohol (okay for some of us, a LOT of alcohol) and conversation that was already throwing us into fits of laughter. Someone said something really funny and Amy, being the most intoxicated of the bunch that night, could no longer handle it. She dropped her head onto the table, shaking it back and forth and laughing hysterically. When she finally sat up, she had the 8 of spades stuck to her forehead.
“LOOK!” I cry, pointing at Amy, and barely able to get the next line out. “Amy got 8!”
Furthering the hilarity of the situation is the fact that Amy had been single for quite some time and often complained about her severe lackanookie problem. We still joke that the only action she got that year was when she got 8 at a card game with 3 other women. 
[hijack]
And what an appropriate tale for my SIXTY-NINTH post!
(Of course when I post this it won’t be funny anymore, but I had to say it.)
[/hijack]
So many memories from the trailer park…
The trailer park being the portable classroom that clashed so magnificently with our rustic prep school campus - also the site of my senior U.S. History AP class. Most of us ate our lunch in class, so we’d always have food sprawled around on the desks. And someone who’d most always take care of any leftovers was Leila, a British girl (we had many a hilarious moment ribbing her about the motherland, but those are other stories) who ate constantly but remained no larger than a pixie stick. A pixie stick with a Union Jack wrapping.
Anyway, one day she finished her lunch and asked if she could eat what was left in a lunch sack sitting on the empty desk next to her. No one objected, because no one knew whose lunch it was, so she proceeded to eat the entire contents of the bag: sandwich, grapes, pudding, and juice box. None of us took any notice of it until fifteen minutes later, David Little, a sophomore who belonged to the political club that met in the history room at lunch, came in the classroom. He quietly started walking around, peering under the desks. It became obvious that he was looking for his lunch, but he didn’t want to disrupt class, so he just left and we all burst out laughing.
At the end of that class, someone kept saying, “Where’d my purse go?” and Walker said, “Leila ate it.”
Ah, dear Walker - we miss you!
This last summer two things happened that had me laughing so hard I was seeing brown spots in front of me.
I went camping with Inor. Funniest human alive. I have this digital camera and we were taking pictures. It also takes movies.
He had me french braid his hair cuz it’s so long, and in one of the pics our heads were tilted so that you could see me but only the side of his face and his hair… it looked like I was kissing an old lady. :: laughing :: Damn, that was funny.
The other time, we decided to make a movie. So I have this guitar music playing in the background and we are sitting at the pic nic table… we vid us kissing… :: laughing :: all you can hear is slurping noises and the music in the background sounded like typical porn music.
lol… guess you had to be there.
Best laugh I ever had.
No, what’s even funnier is the conversation actually went something like:
Pilot: "Control, this is Delta flight 245, uh, we got a guy up here in a lawn chair* with a gun!*.
Tower: "you’ve got a what!?
Larry, if you’ll recall, carried a pellet gun with him on his flight in order to shoot out the weather balloons.
I was in hysterics when I first heard about the aircraft/tower comms.
I’m still laughing, just thinking about what a wonderful sight that must have been at 16,000 feet…
I’m sure it was funny. But if all the commercial and private pilots who claim to have seen Walters on his historic flight actually did, there wouldn’t have been room for him.