What was the biggest laugh you ever got?

In My Humble Opinion
1

The biggest laugh I ever got was during the Sing-Along Sound of Music (I don’t like the film but thought it would be fun to take my mom, who was visiting) at the Prince Charles Cinema in London, which is where it originated.

At the beginning of the show, they hand everyone props to use during the show: a sprig of Edelweiss, a piece of “curtain”, an invitation to the reception, etc. They also included one of those loud, pull-pop noisemakers for the New Year’s Eve celebration.

So we’re singing along, and for NYE, everyone in the theater pops their noisemakers. Everyone except me. It had been ages since I’d seen the movie, but it was an annual event at home growing up, so I remembered enough to know it would come in handy later.

So near the end, Nazi Youth Rolfe has the drop on the Van Trapps! He’s pulled his luger and threatened the Captain & co. that if they take one more step, he’ll shoot! Brave and defiant, Christopher Plummer steels himself and moves forward…

POP! :smiley:

The crowd roars with laughter.

I think I have a pretty good sense of humor, but I don’t crack jokes or perform routines among friends; I’m not a card or stand-up, and definitely am never the one people associate with being uproarious. So maybe it’s fitting that my biggest laugh was in almost complete anonymity.

So, even if you’re not the type they roll in the aisles for, everyone must have one good laugh they’ve caused (even inadvertently). What was yours?

2

I put together a slide show for Albacon 2000 called “1000 years of Albacon,” with the idea that the convention had been around that long.

In one of the slides, I showed a picture of the actual Spanish Inquisition. Someone in the audience shouted out, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” of course.

The next slide showed Cardinals Ximienez, Biggles, and Fang in full regalia with the comfy chair. I start talking about the dealer’s room, look up, stop, and say, “I didn’t expect that.”

Got a great laugh.

3

I was a friends house hanging out. There were about 6 of us and as the night wore on and the beer bottles piled up we started talking about fears and what we were afraid of.

Someone mentioned they were afraid of bugs and I immediately said, “yeah bugs, but how come nobody is afraid of trees?” The other people tore up in laughter while I sat there with a “Huh?” look on my face which apprantly added to the funny.

I was being serious and to this day do not understand how what I said was funny. That was probably the laugh I got from the most amount of people at once.

4

During a game of Beyond Balderdash, I submitted the following fake plot for a movie entitled W.H.I.F.F.S.:

“A group of crusty society matrons is accidentally airdropped over nazi-occupied France”.
MAN I would love to see that movie.

5

I am sure there have been others, but this one jumped immediately to mind:

I was a management consultant working at a company with a team of folks, both my colleagues and client-side members. We were charged with a pretty important task and a tight deadline, so the pressure was ratcheted up.

If you haven’t experienced either being a mgmt consultant, or working with one, it can be…awkward. We’ve been brought in, often by someone fairly senior not directly involved in the day-to-day - and the client folks who were responsible for the daily work often resented our presence and thought we didn’t know shit about their company, the work they did, etc. (and they were often correct, but that’s another story).

Anyway - things had gone awry. The client project lead and the consultant project lead disagreed and the project was going off the rails. We were cooped up in a little project room, all of us steaming at each other and flailing pointlessly with little usable output. Finally, after a few days of this, the co-leads called a team meeting to hash it out. There was much vitriol and finger-pointing - it wasn’t going well. At one point, a client manager puffed his chest out at me and got in my face about the fact that I kept demanding timely status updates (I knew his sub-team was behind schedule and wanted to address that up-front; he was trying to hide it). He went on and on about how I was a bureaucratic schmo and how status reporting was trite and stupid - and WHAT DID I HAVE TO SAY FOR MYSELF ABOUT THAT?!?!!?!?

I replied:

“Um - I suck as a human being?”

The room exploded in laughter - it apparently was the pressure release everyone had been hoping might come along. The guy was in tears, slapping my back like we were bar buddies and everyone fell back in their chairs. The meeting got civil after that and all the important issues were addressed in a practical way and the project got back on track.

It was both surreal and wonderful to witness…

6

I was taking a screen writing class at a community college. We did an exercise where we were supposed to list our three favorite directors and/or actors, then pick one and write a letter from that person, giving me advice on the screenplay I was working on. Then we went around the room, reading them out loud. I picked Steven Spielburg, Edward Norton, and Terry Gilliam. When my turn came, I said, “I wrote to all three of my choices, and they all responded. Steven Spielburg told me I needed more kids, Edward Norton said I needed more Nazis, and Terry Gilliam said I needed more midgets.” It took a good five minutes before the room stopped laughing.

A few years ago, my friend was having a barbeque at his cabin. We’re all standing around outside, watching it get dark, and I started talking about how, if you think about it, trees are kind of creepy. They’re like giant tentacles that have sprouted from the ground in agonizing slowness. They’re constantly moving (growing), but the human eye can’t see it. But every time you’re out in the woods, you’re surrounded by thousands of tentacles, some of them hundreds of feet long, that despite appearing to be immobile, are really flailing around wildly when you’re not looking at them. My friends all laughed and said I was wierd.

Then they were quiet for a minute.

Then we all got up and went inside the cabin and turned on all the lights.

7

I don’t know if this is the biggest, but it’s the first I thought of:

I was in undergrad in a class called “Psychology of Sexual Behavior.” As you might expect, a very popular class, big auditorium lecture hall full of students. One day we had a guest lecturer, a sex threapist who advised couples on how to express themselves sexually in a healthy and positive manner. One of the things she advised her couples to do was to use positive language rather than negative language, e.g. instead of saying “don’t do this” or “I don’t like it when you do that,” say “do this” or “I really like it when you do that.”

“But,” she continued, “what about a situtaion where your partner is making you uncomfortable and doesn’t realize it, say, they’re laying on your hair and pulling it? What could you say positively then? Can anyone give me an example?” I immediately raised my hand.

“Yes?” she said brightly. “What would you say?”

“I really like it when you get off my hair.”

The whole place was howling, lecturer included. I even had to laugh.

8

I usually hate this kind of thing, but was in the right audience for the release of the first Star Wars “Special Edition” to get a pretty good laugh with this…

At the appropriate moment during the Death Star escape:

Mudd: See Luke!
Quick nerd a few rows down: See Luke run!
Obi-wan Kenobi: Run Luke, run!

9

First that comes to mind:
Whilst doing a NH Reads training one summer, we rented an armory for the venue. There were only women in our group. Also there (in a different building) were Army Reserve guys about to deploy overseas. We ended up going out drinking with a few of them and their sargent.

People drank for a while, and I did my usual thing when I’ve had too much - go pretty damn quiet. Until…

Until one of the guys who was decidedly plastered came over with a big grin and yanked something out of his hip pocket and proudly placed it on the table. Everyone looked at it, clearly puzzled. It was a wooden ball with a face painted on it.

Before anyone else could say anything he stumbled off. I nodded sagely and proclaimed “I guess he just wanted to give the whole table a little head.”

Apparently this was exactly the right thing to say because people found it hysterical :smiley: The sargent said it was the funniest thing he’d heard in a while, particularly because no one expected a comment like that from me - at that age people assumed I was as sweet and innocent as I looked.

10

I was in a crowded church full of people for a wedding. The church had long wood pews. The bride (a cousin of mine) had just walked down the aisle and had taken her place next to the groom. A hush fell over the crowd. A few rows in front of where I was sitting, I heard the distinctive sound of a high pitched fart and the pew helped amplify the noise. I looked at my older brother, he was sitting in the same row as I and about 10 people away. He had huge grin on his face and in my vane attempt to not laugh, I snorted. A cousin that was sitting in the row in front of me turned around and looked at me, he was trying oh so hard to not laugh. I broke into an uncontrolled fit of laughter. The kind where you make very little noise and it’s hard to breath. The sound of laughter swelled throughout the church till virtually everyone was in histerics. Even the minister had to turn away in an attempt to keep from laughing. It took a good 10 minutes for order to be restored. My cousin Lisa still calls me laughing man all these years later.

11

During my first week of college everybody in the dorms was getting to know each other. One night in the dining hall a girl at my table mentioned that she was a Republican. The guy next to me asked, “So are you a liberal Republican or a conservative Republican?” Employing my best Glinda voice I jumped in with, “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?”

It wasn’t really all that funny, but once in a while something strikes someone just the right way.

She started laughing. And laughing. And laughing. Big uproarious gales. Her powerful lungs and careful sense of pacing kept the torrent flowing for at least two full minutes. By the time she managed to stop we had most of the dining hall staring at us. I and everyone else at the table looked sheepish while she remained unabashed.

Somehow I did not manage to parlay the encounter into an invitation up to her room. This goes to show how ill-suited I was for the college experience.

12

This is probably one of those rare instances where timing, alcohol, and general silliness just came together at the right time (in other words, a “had to be there” moment), but what the hell . . .

One of my drinking buddies at the time was a long-time Dallas Cowboys fan whose brother had recently landed a job related somehow to Giants Stadium (security or somesuch). A bunch of us were out one Friday night celebrating said buddy’s birthday and after many rounds of beers and shots, he proudly proclaimed, “You’ll never guess what my brother got me! Giant-Cowboy tickets!”

“Really?” I said. “How big were they?”

This was met with about five seconds of dead silence followed by uproarious drunken laughter.

13

Here’s a recent one. I was at a dinner at a fancy steakhouse with a group of game industry people. The party included the head of my studio, the head of the studio we were contracting with at the time, and the senior Sony exec who we all report to, so this was a fairly serious business setting.

Most of the regular steaks on the menu had clever names attached to them: “the cattleman’s cut”, “the cowboy’s cut” … stuff like that. The waitress came to take our order and mentioned that the special that night was a fourteen-ounce bone-in ribeye. Someone at the table asked her if the special had a clever name too.

“Brokeback Mountain cut,” I announced, loud enough for the whole table to hear.

Hilarity insued, partially I think because people were shocked that I was willing to go there in front of my boss’s boss’s boss.

14

One evening in the lounge of my college dorm, Casablanca came on the tv.

One of the audience, doing his best Humphrey Bogart says, “Play it again Sam”

He is then informed that the girls says the line, so he repeats it in a pseudo woman voice.

He’s then informed that she says it much sexier. He replies, “well I’m not a professional femal impersonator.”

To which I replied, “Oh, you’re just and amateur.” The whole room exploded in laughter.

15

I’ll admit I stole the joke from a Reader’s Digest joke page, but I got to do it myself: When I was in the Navy, about 20 other sailors & I were all getting CPR training. One of the steps was to ask the “victim” (one of those half dummies - upper torso only) if they are OK before proceeding with the CPR. My turn came up. I asked the question, put my ear up to the victims mouth, then screamed “She says she can’t feel her legs!”. Big laugh.

16

Oh, too perfect. :smiley:

17

A couple of years back we visited Howe’s Cavern, in upstate NY. We went on the standard group tour, with one guide and 20-30 visitors, many of them children. Near the beginning of the tour the guide asked the group “Who can tell me who Howe’s Cavern is named for?”

It was quiet for a couple of seconds then I yelled out “Mister Cavern!”.

Big laugh. I got the feeling the guide was going to use the gag on future tours.

In retrospect I probably should have said “Lester Cavern!”.

18

High school. Pep band. Playing at a girl’s basketball game. Our team were “The Chieftains”. The opposing team were “The Thunder”.

Well, you know those moments when you’re in a large crowd, and for no apparent reason there’s a brief lull in the noise where nobody is saying anything and it’s almost perfectly silent? One of those moments occurred at precisely the same instant in which I bellowed, “THUNDER THIGHS!”

Big roar from the home crowd :wink:

19

I’ve had 2 such unexpectedly hilarious moments.

The first was ages ago, when I was probably 17. Somehow, my friend Mike talked me into hanging out with him and some of his friends at a coffee shop on Saturday night. These were people who, with the exception of one, I had met at some point previously but did not know well at all. In those situations, I used to be (sometimes still am) very uncomfortable. I spent most of the night sitting there awkwardly and not speaking.

Suddenly, the topic turned to corn cob pipes. Still not sure how that happened. At any rate, one of the guys came out with,

“I want a corn cob pipe.”

Suddenly, words came out of my mouth for the first time that evening. It just seemed the logical progression of the conversation and I was powerless to stop them.

“And a button nose, and two eyes made out of coal?” I inquired.

Uproarious laughter ensued for the next several minutes. Probably a “had-to-be-there” moment, but I for one was confused by how funny everyone (and I mean everyone) found it. It was just some ridiculous statement that flew out of my mouth that I expected to be met with blank stares or perhaps a weak smile or two. Made me feel a lot more comfortable, though, and I think I might have actually spoken a few more times that evening.

The other was more recent, with a couple of friends out at the bar. We got onto the subject of rock ‘n’ roll. This friend, Marc, is in love with rock ‘n’ roll. Not like, it’s his favorite style of music (though it is), but he loves to wax philosophic about the purity and beauty of rock ‘n’ roll, how it was revolutionary (to be clear we’re talking about Chuck Berry or the Clash, not vapid radio bullshit).

I’ve heard the spiel a hundred times before, in fact I once wrote a paper about rock ‘n’ roll’s effect on race and gender relations in America, but decided to probe a little deeper. He was speaking in vague generalities, so I asked, “What has rock done, really? How has rock ‘n’ roll affected society? How has it changed the world?”

He paused to collect his thoughts and respond to my (entirely serious) questions. Before he could, though, I realized it was a perfect set-up for a slightly amusing statement.

“I mean, it’s done a lot for Tibet.” I dead-panned.

His girlfriend snorted Bloody Mary all over the bar, and then gave me a high five. That too surprised me at how funny it was to them, but I guess that’s why I’m not funny generally.

20

Mine’s a Balderdash one too.

The word was “farsi”. My definition was “weirdly flatulent”.

It caught my friend in just the right way. He still breaks up about it about 12 years later.