Doh! :smack:
Very recently I was looking through an older thread, this one. I was doing OK until I got to post #38. Somehow I missed this thread the first time around. But I did remember the thread it’s spoofing very well (I searched 10 times for the thread and the server timed out every time - anyone have a link handy to the “Would you shoot your child and kill your child in this situation?” thread? I tried desperately to hold it in, as I was sitting in a office with three other people, but I started making these snerking, choking, sobbing noises and I finally cracked. I laughed hysterically until tears were streaming down my face. My coworkers didn’t get it.
I also laughed maniacally at Ace Ventura Pet Detective when I saw it in the theater. Yeah, herbal substances were involved. After a while, people started laughing at ME because I couldn’t stop laughing.
A final memorable one was at a party (let’s just say Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was there), my friend and I stole the grocery list off the fridge and spent about 15 minutes adding completely random stuff to it. It’s hard to describe, but the thought of the hosts finding this list the next day had us in convulsions of laughter.
When I first saw the Forbidden Broadway Les Miserables sketch, I thought I would litterally die. I was laughing so hard I could not breathe.
I dreamed a show in day gone by, Neil Diamond didn’t sing my hit song.
A pretty girl they’d glorify, and one act wasn’t so damn long.
I was at a bar with some friends, and a guy told a joke about a duck with the punchline “got any grapes?”. The joke really isn’t all that funny, but for some reason I laughed until I almost peed myself and had to run to the bathroom. My sides hurt, and I couldn’t breathe!
The next day I’m driving along and my cell phone rings. I answer it, and a voice says “got any grapes?” and hangs up. I had to pull over.
It’s got to be a toss-up between the first time I met Phil O’Cybin, or the first time I saw Sam Kinison on his first HBO special. But there’s also the South Park episode where the boys want to be lesbians, like their substitute teacher. How to decide? Those must be the funniest things I’ve ever experienced.
Watching the Reduced Shakespeare Company.
I was pregnant with Ivyboy, so this might have been hormone induced.
We were watching George Carlin, and he has a bit about messing with people’s minds. He said, “Walk up to someone, get very close, and yell I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO SAY!”
Something about Carlin’s expression…I fell on the floor and I thought I was going to go into early labor.
Then, one Thanksgiving, I was helping my step-mom put the food away after this huge feast. She asked my dad if he wanted anything to eat.
He looked at her and said, “Where am I going to put it, Joan? On top of my head?”
I had a Tupperware container in one hand and Saran Wrap in the other, and I just fell on the floor and howled. His delivery was so deadpan and serious and outraged at her suggestion. I’m snickering just thinking about it.
I had a couple experiences like harjario’s back in the day.
I remember just gasping for breath way back when I saw Woody Allen’s Sleeper for the first time. Ditto Animal House.
More recently, the GI Joe section in Fensler Films get me going every single time.
Not everyone “gets” these, they are random and surreal and ridiculous and don’t make any sense.
But me and my younger son just about pee ourselves with laughter every time we watch them. 
My first job we had a woman client with an impossible-to-remember Surname. My boss referred to her as Maria Pokeatwatalot. I almost lost my breath.
I think my moment was at a joke I made myself, which is bad form, I know, but really it was the audience reaction that set me off.
So my boyfriend and I are in the bathroom getting ready for work in the morning, neither clothed yet. Neither of us are morning people and we often tease each other because we’re both cranky. But this day he goes too far and says something either mean or hilarious, depending on which one of us you ask. I can’t think of a good retort at all, so in frustration I grab the toothpaste tube and squeeze a big glob of toothpaste onto his butt.
Him: Ow! That toothpaste is burning my butt!
Me: Yeah, well, that’s how you know it’s working!
The look on his face of equal parts righteous anger, sternly suppressed laughter, and wounded dignity sent me into hysterics. I was on the floor, tears rolling down and gasping for air, and every time I looked at him standing there trying to look superior with toothpaste on his butt it nearly killed me. I still snicker every time I think about it.
Someone had sent me a link to the Lifetime Movie Title Generator at work. I was playing around with it using one of my co-worker/friend’s names (say, Suzy Smith). I chose the setting. For “Supporting Character” I chose “Cousin”, and for “Plot Point” I chose “Kidnapping”.
I got a couple uninteresting titles, like Captive Love and so forth. Then suddenly one pops up…“My Cousin Won’t Stop Kidnapping Me!” - the Suzy Smith Story
I. Laughed. So. Hard. It was just so completely ridiculous, kind of along the lines of Snakes on a Plane now that I think about it. I ran to my friend’s office to try and tell her about it, but I was laughing so hard and so hysterically at that point I could not speak, all I could do was flail my arms and cry and shriek with laughter. Soon she was cracking up just looking at me. I had to waive for her to follow me to my desk and show her what I was laughing at, and she totally did not get it. It took like 30 minutes of wind-down giggles before I could actually speak again. It kind of makes me smirk now, but nothing like that reaction. I thought I was going to die of laughter.
I dont know about the hardest I’ve laughed in my life, but the hardest I’ve laughed recently was while hanging out with my friend. He was in a bad mood and he made the following comment, which was hilarious in person but probably only amusing to anyone reading it:
“I’m really grumpy today,” he said, “you know, like if I were a baby I’d be crying right now.”
I guess you had to be there and hear the way he said it.
In the mid to late 80s there was a tribute dinner held for Joan Collins. It wasn’t an AFI event, but there were several major stars in attendance, including Clint Eastwood. It was the usual kind of boring “I worked with her and she was a consummate pro, etc.
At times an someone would sing, or a comedian would tell some jokes. And one of the entertainers played the guitar. But the thing that made it unique was that he had no arms and played the guitar with his bare feet.
He was actually quite good. But he played for what seemed to be quite a long time, to the point where cameras broke to shots of the stars reaction to the performance. There was certain awkwardness to the whole thing, and then the camera focused on Collins. She had a pained expression on her face until she realized that the camera was on her. She then changed expressions (which was hysterical, kind of the ultimate – “busted”). The friend who I was watching it with didn’t make a sound and we didn’t look at each other.
The guitarman kept playing and another camera shot went back to Collins, who was caught off guard again with that expression that says “when is this ever going to end.” She then realized the camera was on her again, but she didn’t make as much of an effort to hide her feelings. My friend and I then looked at each other and began to laugh. And it was the kind of laughter that has no sound. Just that rocking motion with tears streaming down our faces.
Finally the performance ended and we had composed ourselves. We never once commented on the performance or Collins’ reaction. But every time we looked at each other for the rest of the evening, we started to laugh. The kind of laughter that when you stop, you just start up again, almost to the point of hurting.
The first time I saw Andrew Dice Clay’s standup.
Father Ted, a grubby window and hand gestures. Father Ted, Dougal and some bovine perspective. Alan Partridge’s chocolate covered face.
Three times on the floor, a lung coughed up.
Senior year in high school, I was on one of those Jeopardy-style teams. Scholastic Challenge, or whatever it was called. Anyway, there were ten of us, but only five spaces on a panel, so we rotated. At one meet, I was sitting out a round, and the teacher’s desk (different school, we were in a classroom) was in my eyeline. There was a framed picture where people normally put photos of their family, except this one was a magazine photo of a morbidly obese, bedridden man, with the notation “Brownies and chocolates did this!!”
I was able to keep silent, but that’s all. Silent shaking, wheezing, stuffing my sleeve in my mouth, thinking about sad things to no avail…Several of my teammates saw the photo too; one didn’t think it was funny, but the others did, though none of them were in the same condition as me. Luckily, the panelists couldn’t see me.
More recently, I found this on YouTube. Mr. Rilch heard me howling and pounding the desk, and came up to see what the deal was. Tears streaming from my eyes, I restarted it for him. Again, he didn’t think it was quite as funny as I did, but he got a laugh or two. He says the best part is the very end, where the one girl casually says, “Okay” and makes a “cut” sign with her hand.
First time I ever saw Gallagher on Showtime. . . Sledge-o-matic “puts the cat out all night, teaches the dumbest dog to play dead and keeps the neighbor kids in there own damn yard” and smashing produce.
The “Funniest things ever said during sex” thread . . . and Master Wang Ka’s post about samurai swords and Jehovah’s Witnesses are a close second.
Actually, in this thread I mentioned this one incident (I think this was my second-most hysterical episode) involving an English post-doc who worked in the same place I did when I was living in D.C. He had asked someone about something fun to do for the coming weekend, and that someone suggested he try “Blue Knob”, a ski area in Pennsylvania. This just set him on a tear. “Blue Knob??? Are you quite serious? Oh, it’s not that hard, is it? Well, I mean, it wouldn’t be, would it? Oh, and how high? That’s sounds like one fecking enormous cyanotic knob, it does. Would I like to climb it in the summer? Come again?” I’m sure you just had to be there, but the whole pitch of his voice, just everything about the delivery had myself and two or three other overworked, sleep-deprived geeks quite literally pounding our fists on the bench and gasping frantically for air.
But the #1 time: Much of my childhood was spent living the lower-middle-class lifestyle of semi-rural Maine (by greater-Bostonian standards, somewhere in the Siberian tiaga), and folks like us burned wood in the winter the keep the house heated. That meant every other night my brother and I would cart armfulls of firewood from the pile out in back of the house, across the yard, into the garage, and down the stairway to the basement, stacking the wood just outside the door so that when my dad fed the fire it was handy. Moonless nights in that part of ME in the winter are dark. In the garage, it was even darker.
My brother and I had walked that route so many times we could do it with our eyes closed, so we rarely bothered to turn on any lights; our eyes would adjust to see by starlight anyway. For some reason, I don’t remember why now, my brother went back outside after we were finished (probably dropped a mitten or something), and I told him I was going inside to get warm. But I didn’t. I stood against the wall in the garage and waited. It seemed like it took him forever, but finally he reentered the garage and headed for the door to the 1st floor entry. I could barely see him, and he didn’t even register me, stock-still and in the blackest shadow.
He got about three feet from me and I bellowed my most ferocious bellow: “RAAAAAAAAAAWWWWRRR!” The poor kid. The poor, poor kid. He just had no idea. It was totally dark, dead quiet, he was all alone, he just wasn’t expecting even the slightest thing, and I had completely ambushed him. He screamed, a bloody-murder scream like I never heard any human being make in my life. While screaming his poor little head off, he flailed his arms around wildly in the air, like he was tumbling backwards off a cliff and clutching desperately at empty space to stop his fall. And, in fact, he did fall over. His legs just turned to rubber, and he toppled backwards, still flailing, his screams turning into a kind of high-pitched babbling, like the gibbering of an agitated monkey. This reaction had exceeded my wildest expectations. It was, quite simply, the perfect scare. I was overcome with mirth, and started laughing so hard I fell over too. My brother obviously figured it all out by now, and was really, really pissed. He started pounding on me and cursing, half crying, half lauging, and meanwhile I was just rolling on the floor with tears coming out of my eyes, gasping “Oh my God, ohhh my God…”
My dad flung open the door to the garage at that point and hollered “What the Christ is going on out here?” We both stopped laughing instantaneously for about three seconds, staring at his glaring face, and then completely lost it. We were in total hysterics, and my dad was baffled. “What the Hell is the matter with you two? What?? What is it?” We couldn’t answer him, we could barely even breathe, so he just shook his head and went back inside. I think we couldn’t even get up for fifteen minutes. I remember feeling exhausted afterwards, and slept very soundly that night, with great satisfaction.
I’m with Wee Bairn, there are some Borat scenes that have caused me to choke with laughter.
However, the hardest I’ve ever laughed was when I was on vacation in Cuba with my mother a few years ago. We decided to watch the entertainment on our first evening there, which was apparently a modern dance show, but it sounded way cooler in Spanish.
Mom and I made the mistake of sitting in the first row like the eager tourists we were. But this was real honest-to-God modern dance. I mean these lithe, half-naked men and women were flinging themselves about on stage, hurling themselves on the floor and oozing angst all over the front row. One dance seemed to be about a woman who was madly, lustfully in love with…a chair.
I sat very still for the first twenty minutes or so, stealing an occasional glance at my mother, who looked very composed and engrossed in the performance. So I, in turn, tried to look as interested as possible, for her sake. But eventually, after the dancer first caressed the chair, then threw it angrily across the stage, I leaned over and whispered,
“I don’t get it.”
There was a pause. My mother seemed to consider this for a moment. Then, very calmly, my dear, lovely mother replied,
“There’s too much damn dancing.”
With that, we both burst into giggles, which we immediately tried to stifle because after all, we were in the front row. But as you know, the more you stifle laughter, the more it builds up. So within moments we were both sitting there, shaking helplessly, tears rolling down our faces. Unable to hang on, we lurched from our seats and up the aisle, wheezing and snorting and hacking.
Even now, I can’t tell the story without a snerk or two.
Ditto Animal House here, too. Some friends and I saw it at a drive-in when it first came out. (We had several, er, destabilizing compounds on the menu that night, I must confess.) My sides have never hurt so bad.
For my brother, it had to be when we watched Tenacious D: The Complete Masterworks. He was, pardon the cliche, rolling on the floor. After about 20 minutes we had to pause the DVD so he could catch his breath.