Once during a conference, as I was discussing a patient, the clinic director, who was a foul ass of a man, casually crossed his legs, lifted up his right cheek, and ripped one. It stopped the conference cold. I, for what may be the only time in my life, maintained my composure in the face of the fart, though several others didn’t. I bit the inside of my cheek until it bled though to hold it in.
I think the worst part of this discussion is how an ex just emailed me saying he knew my posts were mine because no one else finds farts as funny as I do. Sad thing is, he’s right.
In a class once we were watching a documentary on death and what happens in morgues and stuff. And they were interviewing nurses about the first time they ever saw a dead body. And one nurse said, “My first time, I was 18, and it was a nun.”
cue sexual connotations
I couldn’t stop laughing. I’m still laughing about it right now as I’m typing this years later.
I was 16 or 17 at the time, if that helps. At that age, *everything * has sexual connotations.
I was sitting in the living room, watching a movie with my sister. My dad was going to get something out of the basement, but the light over the steps had gone out. So as my sister and I were sitting there, we could hear slow deliberate footsteps, followed by a pop and the sound of glass tinkling, and then the machine gun thudding of a body (my dad) sliding down the stairs. We sat there laughing for a good five minutes before we realized he was awfully quiet. Finally, he came back upstairs, rubbing an elbow and none the worse for wear.
Another time, I was working with one guy who was evil. Really a malicious prankster type. Not necessarily the Devil himself, but one of his lower imps. So one day we were working on a video display (TV screen, actually) with the power on. I was standing to one side and he touched the wrong wire. From about five feet away, in a noisy room, I could hear the arcing sound and I watched him jump back about five feet. Normally, when I see a person get a shock like that, the first impulse is to feel concern. Not the case with this guy. I was busting a gut laughing, figuring this guy got his just dessert.
In senior year of high school (I would have been 16 too) we had to take “Death and Dying”, which included a trip to the funeral home. I was developing a crush on this hunky guy in my class and remember ogling him and trying to catch his eye in room full of caskets. Even though there were no actual dead people there, it seems very vaguely inappropriate.
I laugh at so many things I shouldn’t. For instance, in my work people get ‘briefed’ a lot, as in, told a short version of things they need to know. But to me the verb sounds like ‘pantsed,’ every single time - as in, ‘We briefed the minister.’ I always have to suppress my giggles.
And a related story, although it didn’t happen to me: my lawyer friend had to take down the story of a man who had been beaten quite savagely, and whose first language wasn’t English. It was a solemn occasion, understandably, but when he said ‘punched’ it sounded very much like ‘pantsed,’ so his story - ‘Oh, they pantsed me many times, it was a very brutal pantsing’ - almost made my friend weep, but for all the wrong reasons.
At a former job, I worked in a heavy equipment dealer’s print shop. My boss was in his office and I was out in the shop when one of the accountants came down to talk to him.
Both these gentlemen were old school Southern landed gentry. Voted for Jesse Helms every election and had their opinions about the place of various minority groups. They were talking about a country club and how their golf games were coming along.
Then the accountant got all solemn and quiet and said in a voice filled with contempt, “Ah heard they were going to start letting JEWS in theyuh.”
When I heard this, I just burst out laughing, and I am a loud laugher. They both came out and looked at me like I was insane.
I have congestive heart failure, which means (among other things) that I find it difficult to walk or stand for more than about three minutes. I CAN walk or stand during those minutes, but if I have to try to stay on my feet for longer than that I’m quite likely to fall down from exhaustion. I also have an extremely unreliable knee, so that I am at risk to fall down at any time, no matter how long I have been walking or standing. So I can totally understand why that guy was using the cart, and why he was capable of getting out of the cart and moving it. You think YOU were having a bad day? He was having mobility problems. I bet your day didn’t even come close.
Just wanted to say I didn’t intend for this thread to be mean spirited. When I fell up the stairs and broke my foot and everyone laughed at me (I laughed too, kind of a laugh/ouch/laugh) I thought about how sometmes we laugh about things we shouldn’t. I try not to hurt people’s feelings though.
I wasn’t intending to be mean, either. I had been having a bad day - in fact, the previous night I had been mugged at gunpoint in Washington University parking lot on the way back from a happy hour with some former class mates, and about a half hour before I saw the guy in the cart, I had broken my finger by slamming it in the trunk of my car. (Usually when I get injured, it’s because of some idiotic thing that I manage to do to myself - not anything anyone else does to me.)
Regardless of the way my day went, you’re right - I probably shouldn’t have found it funny, and normally wouldn’t have if I weren’t still kind of edge from having a gun held to my head the previous night, and then in pain from having broken my finger just a half hour before. However, I’m sorry to have offended you, and hope that there are no bad feelings.
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Something else funny occurred to me. That day I saw the guy in the cart, I had recently been mugged and broke my finger that day. Two years ago, when in grad school, I had gotten mugged in the same place, broke a finger by having a TV smash down on it and my boyfriend dumped me (over the phone, no less) all in the same week. With a gread deal of hindsight, that strikes me as funny, since the odds are pretty slim that I’d have such a similar sequence on two separate years. Oh, well. Just thought I’d share.
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Years ago there used to be a tv show locally here in DC called “Redskins Sidelines” where each week during the regular football season Glen Brenner (when he was alive) and Sonny Jurgenson would bring players on live and talk about the previous week’s game, upcoming stuff, etc. You could write in and get free tickets to the tapings, which my dad and I would do many times each year. One taping in particular was memorable. We had 3 tickets, so it was me, my dad, and my friend Carrie. Carrie and I were about 13 or 14 years old when the “inappropriate giggling factor” for girls is very, very high. And my dad… well… this is a man who thinks tapping someone on the shoulder then running away so they don’t see who tapped them is the height of hilarity.
There were just bleacher-style seats for the audience, and a man sat down in front of us who was mildly retarded and also rather a large man. As soon as he sat down, his pants, which weren’t belted, dipped well below his crack and exposed about 4 inches of hairy ass. I noticed it first and tried to keep it quiet but it was no use. Then when my dad got an eyeful, he crossed his two index fingers (like a Christian cross) and pointed it down towards the offending crack, as if to say “STAY AWAY DEMON!” and we completely lost it.
The man stayed relatively quiet through the first part of the part of the taping, then at one point when they were asking the crowd to yell and cheer especially loud for whatever reason, that man stood up (pants still hanging below crack level) and screamed “WE’RE NUMBER ONE, WE’RE NUMBER ONE” over and over again until they went to commercial. The night was over for us, we were beyond control and waited in the hallway until the end of the taping.
I was zipping down a street and suddenly found myself going through a large, deep puddle. The side of the road was pretty much flooded. I didn’t want to brake for fear of losing traction, so I just plowed on through, kicking up a giant spray of dirty water. And then I saw two people on the sidewalk. My first thought was “Oh no, they’re going to get soaked!” and that combined with the panicked looks on their faces made me start laughing. And then thinking about their perspective, some guy zooming along, sprays them with water, and laughs about it, made me laugh even harder.
Pretty much any time laughter would be inappropriate, it makes me laugh all the harder.
At a cousin’s wedding, the minister was talking about how it’s important to love your partner as much as yourself. He said “It’s easy to love yourself.” I thought “And sometimes, self-love is all that’s available.” It’s hard not to laugh when half of one’s brain seems devoted entirely to smart-assed remarks. Luckily, I’m able to feign coughing fits well enough.
The other day, one of my colleagues described a foreign caller as being hard to understand because he ‘talked funny’ - I made a light hearted crack which included the words ‘cultural ignoramus’ - it really wasn’t intended to be harsh at all, but it was one of those situations where it seemed like a good idea right up until the words tripped off my tongue, then I could see that she was actually quite wounded by it. But it didn’t help at all when she said “How can I be an ignoramus when I don’t even know what it means?” - I mistook this for an incredibly witty and ironic parry and I collapsed in uncontrollable hysterics. Which was also the wrong thing to do, because it was just an innocent question and it just looked like I was laughing at her directly.
Honestly, the colleague in question isn’t ignorant, just young and a little naive, but in the space of a few seconds I managed to dig a deep hole that any attempt at explanation merely dug a little deeper. :o
Years ago I had read an article in a science magazine maybe it was Discover I don’t remember. There was an article about laughter and it’s meaning and why people laugh. Those who were studying laughter found that some people would laugh at nonsensical sentences that were not meant to be funny. The author then gave an example of a sentence that some people laughed at that wasn’t meant to be funny: A boy stuck his head in a pail of water.
When my sister and I were kids, we sat by ourselves in church, as our parents sang in the choir. Normally, we were well-behaved, aside from our usual subtle attempts to get the other one in trouble. But one day, we totally lost it.
For starters, the pastor came in with jet black hair. Rather unusual for a 60+ year old man who had had snowy white locks for years. :eek: He had a reputation for being vain, but this took the cake. Everyone’s attempts keep to ignore this glaringly obvious change made keeping in the giggles absolutely impossible. The dirty looks the adults cast our way only extended our laughter. Thank god for the loud organ music to cover our noise.
After the shock had finally worn off, we did a remarkable job of keeping straight faces. Not bad for a couple of kids in their teens. But, the mood had been set. During the next hymn, my sister leaned over to me and sagely observed, “Did you know that every song can be sung by spelling out ‘Mickey Mouse’?” She demonstrated, singing along to Amazing Grace, “M-I-C-K-E-Yyyyyy… M-O-U-S-EEEEeeeeeeee!”
That about did it for my intake of blasphemous absurdity for the day. Total gigglefit for the two of us and we had to excuse ourselves.
To this day, I can’t sit through a mass without mentally substituting “Mickey Mouse” for some of the verses. Considering how I’m a liturgical musician, I sit through upwards of 3 masses a week. I suppose it’s a good thing I’m an instrumentalist and not a singer!
My friend smokes alot of pot. One day I was the passenger in his car, which absolutely wreaks like pot. We get pulled over by a cop for speeding. The cop asks us if we have marijuana in the car. We say “No”. The cop asks: “Well then why does it smell like marijuana?”. My friend says (in an annoyed manner, like when your mother asks you if you’re still constipated in the presence of your girlfriend): “It ALWAYS smells like pot in here!” I absolutely cracked up laughing right in front of the cop. But I think I saved him because then the cop started laughing and told us to go get the interior of the car washed. And he didn’t even give us a ticket for speeding.
After my friend’s (different friend from above) engagement party, a bunch of us went to his house to watch a movie. It was 5 girls and 4 guys, all just friends except for the newly engaged couple. So we decide that the guys should go out and get the movie from Blockbuster, while the girls wait for us at home. It should’ve taken no more than a half-hour to complete this. After leaving Blockbuster, I decide that we should make a quick stop at the bar and do a quick shot. We end up doing about 4 shots each in 15 minutes. After gaining our buzzes, another friend decides that we should make a quick trip to the strip club. This was before anyone had cellphones, and no one thought to stop at a pay phone to tell the girls that we’d be a little late. So we go to a nasty strip club where the strippers do all kinds of crazy stuff. No real sex, but they grind and fake oral with clothes on, etc. Anyway, we finally leave after about 2 hours. We rush home. It’s now 3 hours past when we were due back. The girls were obviously quite worried. And we were too drunk and stupid to even make up an excuse. We get out of the car and girls (along with several concerned neighbors who had driven all around to look for us) are on the porch waiting for us. The first person to walk up the steps was my newly-engaged friend. The first person to greet him was his new fiancee. Her first words: “IS THAT LIPSTICK ON YOUR FACE???!!!” My friend looks confused. My other friend slyly reaches over and rubs the lipstick off his face. The engaged guy says: “Whatd’ya mean? I don’t have any lipstick on my face.” Everyone just looks embarrassed. The poor neighbors even have to go through this. But the fiancee now notices something else. She says: “Is that lipstick on your pants? ON YOUR CROTCH?!?!?” He denies it and turns around to show us. And there it is. You see, the poor guy chose to wear white jeans. We all absolutely flipped out laughing. The poor girl started crying and yelling. But one neighbor appreciated the humor and started laughing too. But there was a happy ending. They are married with 2 beautiful kids.
I was at Disneyworld with my family a few weeks ago, and as we were waiting for a bus to arrive to take us to one of the parks, a lady in one of those hoverround things drives up. The bus gets there and the lady , who seemed to be in the cart because she was immensly overweight, had to be put into this little elevator type thing to get into the bus while remaining in her cart. As we watched this lady being lifted up on the little elevator, I started to laughso hard there were tears in my eyes, but I couldnt laugh out loud, and for me, trying to hold in a good laugh makes me laugh even harder. I was standing there snorting, and giggling, andhiding my face in my hands laughing so hard on the inside. That ladies family was looking at me like I was the devil, and I felt bad, but I was still laughing. My mother got really pissed at me too. Some people have no sense of humor.
I have ALWAYS laughed at inappropriate moments … especially when I see someone get hurt … it’s horrible, but quite uncontrollable. Two stories:
in my glamourous parking-lot attendant job a zillion years ago, the arm of the thingie intended to keep cars from leaving until they had paid, came down on this elderly pedestrian who was walking out of the parking lot, not paying attention … right on top of her HEAD … her family was horrified and kept glaring at me as if it was MY fault somehow. It didn’t help that I had to actually duck down to hide under the cash register shelf because I was laughing so hard. She wasn’t bleeding or anything but I’m sure it was quite startling, and I actually felt very badly for her, because it must’ve smarted! But still … SO funny to me.
just this morning I was dreaming that my S/O and I were already awake, and in my dream state I tenderly put my hand on my his face … but in reality, I abruptly stuck my thumb into his eye while he was still sleeping … woke him up quite horribly … I’m STILL laughing about it … and God it was hard to go back to sleep … I had a few guffaws that I tried to disguise as coughs - I hope he was already asleep … poor bastard.
I’m still laughing about it right now … it’s ridiculous!
