Me and a friend of mine participated in a focus group to make a quick fifty bucks. The group was made up of about 15 guys, aged 16 to 20 (already a recipe for disaster). The lady who ran the group figured that the best way to relate to us would be to try and act as “hip” as she could, but she really just came off as a smarmy bitch. So, there was this huge tray of food that was laid out for us and about halfway through the session, the lady decides to eat some crackers. She takes a big bite out of one and a GIGANTIC (dime-sized) piece of cracker sticks to her upper lip. She had just applied red lipstick and the cracker stuck like glue to her lip. My friend and I noticed it first, followed shortly after by the rest of the group. We tried to hide our laughter, we really did, but soon everybody but the bitch was in tears. The sad part is she thought we were laughing about the product and tried (unsuccessfully) to play it off.
Without a doubt, the funniest thing I have witnessed.
I have one general and one specific tale of inappropriate laughter.
The specific: My friend Tracy and I were at a teacher conference in a large hotel ballroom. It was quiet, the presenter was presenting and Tracy was bored. She started fishing through my purse just to see if there might be anything of more interest than the lecture. She pulled out a little note pad which I had bought because of the really cute sleeping lion cub on the cover–I never really used it for anything–well, I once tried out a pen in it. She opened the pad and all the pages were blank except for the first one on which was written one word in teeny tiny letters: toe. She looked at me, mouthed “toe?” and we were gone. Tears streaming down our faces, body-shaking silent laughter. Couldn’t stop. People around us gave us serious teacher frowns and the presenter tried her best to ignore us. What the hell was so funny about “toe” anyway? Just one of those things.
The general: I laugh when people throw up. No, I don’t think it is funny, it is some kind of nervous reaction. Doesn’t matter who’s barfing (as long as it’s not me), I giggle. When my daughter was a little kid and got sick I would hold her hair back as she leaned over the toilet bowl, I would rub her back and wish like hell that I could take her pain away. I definitely found nothing funny about the situation, but when she heaved–I laughed. As quietly as I could and all the time berating myself for being such a shitty mom, I laughed. She knew me, though. She would spit the icky slime into the toilet bowl and say to me, “Mom, you’re laughing, aren’t you?”
I Am Sam sets me off like no other movie. Not because of it’s tenderness or Sam’s naivity, but because he’s disabled. I laughed through most of the movie, but probably laughed the hardest when one of the characters said, “All you need is love” during the trial to get his very young (but still smarter than he is) daughter back. During a fairly long trip to Australia/Indonesia, I saw the movie nine times or so. Every time I saw that movie, I got dirty looks.
I also laughed during Flawless when Robert De Niro’s character is in speech therapy after he suffers a stroke. That didn’t go over too well either. I imagine someone up there wants me to get my ass kicked.
I went to see Memento in the theatre.
There’s a part in the movie where the lead man is talking to a barmaid, and they’re talking about his memory problem.
B: “So, what’s the last thing you remember?”
LM: “My wife.”
B: “That’s sweet.”
LM: “Dying.”
I just burst out laughing. I don’t know why - I seem to find siccinct (sp?) sentences to be funny. Anyway, I suddenly realized that it wasn’t supposed to be funny, and slid down in my seat as I tried to stop laughing. But I couldn’t!
Another time, I was hanging out with my sister at a friend’s apartment. We were outside on the patio while I smoked, and we were listening to her downstairs neighbors talk. I’d never seen them, but they spoke in ebonics and sounded like black women. I didn’t care about what they were talking about (boys or something) until I heard the following in DEEP ebonics:
“You wouldn’t know it to look at me, since I have blond hair and blue eyes, but I’m half black.”
My sister and I look at each other and just start giggling like mad. But we have to be quiet because we can’t let them know that we’ve been listening to them. And seeing her laugh made ME laugh more, which made HER laugh more until we just went inside because we couldn’t keep it in any more.
I have no idea why it was SO funny, but it was.
Well, these are not funny stories - rather, related commentary.
I spent much of my younger years in the inappropriate laugh/grin mode when reacting to certain stimuli. When one of my friends’ (twins) dad confronted me about some teenage indiscretion, I could not but paste a stupid smile on my face while being berated. That convinced him that I was evil beyond all doubt, and one of his two boys believes that to this day (and that such absolves him of guilt for our mutual sins). The other brother is a much cooler customer.
Another time, I got busted for a felony and I could only grin while being interrogated, and staying silent. I was not trying to bait or ridicule the interrogator - grinning was all I could do - but it absolutely pissed off the cop; fortunately I remembered my Ps and Qs and that one went nowhere. One of my mates took the bust and that was it.
Later, in college, I had a county D.A. tell me that I had been very lucky with the details to escape an initial charge. Once again, I could muster not but the stupid grin. He found another charge to file.
Eventually, I learned. Nowadays I can stoneface through just about anything.
I was visiting a friend at the barn where she keeps her horses, and walking along chatting with her as she picked piles of droppings out of the paddock, periodically rolling her wheelbarrow over to the bedding-and-manure pile in the center of the field.
We were deeply absorbed in our conversation; so engrossed that, as I walked with her, I neglected to look where I was going and stepped onto the slope of the head-high heap, tripped, and toppled full-body, face-first, into the pile.
Poor Ruth! She was horrified, and couldn’t believe I about split a gut laughing. Hey, I was wearing my usual stinky barn clothes anyway. 
My people - I’ve found you, at last!
I’m also a stupid grinner and inappropriate laugher.
My inappropriate laughing moments - I saw a little kid get knocked down by his mom’s shopping cart one day at Safeway. He wasn’t hurt; it was just so funny the way he looked like a puppet…I guess you had to be there. I mean, he was running all over the store, bugging everyone, then BAM! his own mom knocks him down.
Then there was my old lady typing teacher telling a class full of girls that the secret to proper typing is “stroking rhythmically…stroke…stroke…” We all very studiously avoided looking at each other.
Then there was the woman I worked with setting her hair on fire. She held the lighter up to her head to hear if it still had butane in it, but from force of habit, she flicked the sparking mechanism at the same time. So her hair full of hairspray goes up in flames, and our co-worker standing there with her is laughing too hard to help her put her head out. (I wasn’t actually a witness to that one, but I did laugh inappropriately when she described it later. And now, as a matter of fact.)
I don’t know if this is inappropriate or not, but while downtown today, I saw a large, cement statue of an abstract head with a wad of napkin that someone had shoved up its nostril. I couldn’t help but smirk at that.
Ringo, I too have learned to mostly keep it in. I’ve learned that not everyone shares my sense of humour, or understands that my grinning has nothing to do with them.
This is always a problem for me when there is supposed to be silence. When I was a child (like up until about 12 or so), my parents would insist on saying their prayers with me when I went to bed. I was usually finished before they were, so I just had to kneel there and be quiet. One night, I remembered this joke my friend told me and I kept giggling and couldn’t stop. I tried covering my mouth, my ears (for some reason, this seemed to work before). I must have fallen asleep or something because my mother sort of shook me and said that they had been waiting for ten minutes.
The college I transferred from is a Quaker school, so moments of silence are big up there 
One day, we were having a floor meeting, which, of course began with the customary MOS. I had been wound up all day, and had a giggle fit, which got worse the more I tried to stifle it.
I laugh at tragedies. I was in giggles when my sister called me on Sept 11 to wake me up and tell me to turn on the news. Once, I was at a classmate’s funeral with a few other girls. One got up and left to go tothe bathroom or something and she just didn’t come back. My friend leaned over and said “I bet she’ll walk in with the family…” I know, it doesn’t sound funny, but that was it. I laugh at funerals anyway and the thought of Bobby strolling in with the family and the casket was just too much. Fortunately, it looked like my body was wracked with sobs, not giggles.
Another time, I was walking out of Red Lobster with my dad. He’s a big guy, and I was quite the chubby kid. We walked by a very fat woman on her way in. I wasn’t laughing at the woman though, I was laughing at the whole stupid situation. I mean, did any of us need to gorge on all you can eat shrimp? No. But there we were. I think my dad was mortified.
I’m sure I’ve posted this before - but when I was in college, a friend of mine was a major in Psych. She came back to our dorm one day and claimed that her prof had told her that 1 in 8 people had experimented with beastiality (whether this is true or not, I have no idea - it sounds AWFULLY high to me).
Anyways, the gist of it was, there were 8 of us in the room when she told us this, and for some strange reason, we decided that my friend Barb was the one who had done it. We teased her something awful about it for about a week, then more or less forgot about it.
So, a while later, we were at this “Accepting Differences” or something seminar, and the speaker was talking about how disabilities are much more common than you might think. She said “Do you know the percentage of people who have a mobility problem? … About 1 in 8! 1 in 8!!!”
Of course, we all look instantly at Barb, who immediately turns bright red. We all lost it completely. There was a great display of coughing and sniffing in our row, but there was no real hiding it. I really thought I might wet myself. Eventually 2 or 3 of us had to leave the room.
This was about 6 years ago, and I still think it’s hilarious. I live in fear that I will one day run into someone who recognizes me from that seminar and thinks that I find people who suffer from mobility imparments inexplicably hysterical.
About a week ago, I went to see a really wretched production of Richard III with my friend Beth and her husband (who left at the interval, since he didn’t have to be there for class purposes. Smart man!) Fortunately, it was funny-bad instead of just painful-bad. But then, it was a great struggle trying to keep our convulsive laughter quiet…I’m tremendously glad the upper balcony of the theater was nearly empty!
Probably the worst parts: Queen Margaret’s “banshee on speed” routine, the not-quite-epic Richard/Richmond sword/wrestling match at the end of the play, and worst of all, the scene in which Richard suborns the murder of his nephews. Now, last semester I wrote a paper on St. Thomas More’s History of Richard III, and in this paper I made much of the fact that in More’s version of the same scene Richard is sitting on the privy when he arranges the murder, as it’s “a convenient carpet for such a council.” Now, by this point in the production I’d become mildly hysterical from two hours’ worth of exposure to bad Shakespeare, and I leaned over to Beth and whispered “They should be in the privy!” And my eleven-year-old self took over. Although I managed nonetheless not to laugh aloud, thankfully.
Bad productions do really nasty things to people. I mean, I don’t normally find depictions of planning child murder funny, and I do know how to conduct myself in public…
(BTW, this is a touring company from New York – it’s part of that “Shakespeare in American Communities” thing the NEA is sponsoring. If your town is getting the Acting Company’s production of Richard III, consider yourself warned.)
I always found it hysterically funny that characters in Shakespeare have a tendency to announce their own deaths. One time in high school drama we were watching Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, which is a pretty graphic, violent film that you probably shouldn’t be laughing at. And some little boy was stabbed to death or something and as he’s dying he says to his mother, “Mother, they killed me!” I just found that hysterically funny.
Just reading that cracked me up. I think I would find myself in the same situation as you, one where no one else was laughing.
I tend to laugh a lot at small stuff. Life’s too short not to.
About 5 or 6 years ago, the house across the street from me caught fire and burned completely down to the foundation. It was terribly tragic – the family was just scraping by around the poverty line, and they had no insurance. I didn’t laugh then. The next day, the remainder of the rubble burst into flame. I laughed long and hard then. It was (I think) the absurdity of the situation. The family had just been kicked in the face, and it seemed that the Universe was confirming its stance against them.
I have something of a history of inappropriate laughter that has gotten me into a lot of trouble over time, so I have to watch myself very closely.
Reading this thread has been wonderful therapy. Good laughs.
My brother and I were up late one night, sitting in his room. I can’t remember what we were talking about—it might have been the upcoming Mother’s Day. He suggested we go get really drunk and get tattoos and wake Mom up in the middle of the night to show her, and proclaimed loudly in a mock-drunken voice: “Hey mom, look, I got this for you gggbgbghhbaarrrrffffff.”
We laughed as loudly as we dared and added mock-barfing noises to our comedy repetoire. We got so good at telegraphing the first few erp—ungh—blrrff—uggck moments of pre-barf nausea that one simple glance between us would set the other off.
Cut to: Thanksgiving in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. The bus on the way to the airport, with other tourists on board. We’re discussing some of the souvenirs we picked up. And, quietly: “hey, mom, I got ungghhaabbllleerrrffffffff—”
“Boys, stop it, you’re embarassing me!”
“Ungkk—” and bug eyes, cheeks puffed up with mock vomit.
“Boys!”
“Gherrghgppff—”
“Stop that!”
Very quietly: “Erp—”
We were in hysterics. There’s nothing that feels better—and no worse time—than laughing at the forbidden. I love this thread.
9/11 plus two.
I was in ground zero volunteering with the Salvation Army and this guy (I guess he was some sort of construction worker) comes out from the area where the mounds of rubble were an just spews vomit all over the place.
I had to laugh!!!
Go figure!
I have a great appreciation for the absurd, and farting noises. Both make me laugh uproariously, but with age I’ve learned to hide it fairly well.
Bugle playing usually sets me off. A badly played bugle or trumpet sounds a lot to me like a wet, sloppy fart. Heard amidst a solemn occasion, it’s enough to force me to bite my cheeks and clench my fists to supress the laughter. I have real trouble at war remembrance services when a bugler fluffs “The Last Post” and injects a noisy farting sound into what’s supposed to be a reserved, solemn moment:
Bwaaa-bwaa-bwaaaa-bwaaaa-bwaaBLAAART!
I also have real trouble not laughing at church or funeral services when something goes wrong. It’s the positioning of a minor absurdity against what should be a dignified, sombre event that sets me off.
Jervois, you wouldn’t have made it through my sister’s wedding. Her husband loves a bargain so when an acquaitance learn he was about to get married, he volunteered to play the trumpet for them. My brother-in-law immediatly agreed without asking to hear a bit. During the wedding, his playing left much to be desired–full of squeaks and squawks and off notes. I think quite a few of us were glad the trumpeter was out of sight in the organ loft as he played and couldn’t see us trying not to laugh at him…even the bride and groom.
One time when I was a teen, we were in church when an ambulance went by outside. It was during a time for silent prayer and the ambulance’s siren started making the really weird noise, sort of along the lines of the type you hear in England. Many people in the congregation just about lost it then.
You know what’s weird. I always used to feel bad about laughing when Mr. Bill got smashed by Mr. Hand. It didn’t matter that he was just a lump of clay and everyone, including me, laughed our guts out. I still felt bad about it.
I should mention for you youngsters that Mr. Bill was a bit they used to do in the early days of Saturday Night Live.
Life is absurd.
Those who are not laughing are missing the joke.