I’ve had exactly the same thing on one occasion. I can’t even remember what I was laughing about. All I can remember is that first I couldn’t stop giggling. Then my cheeks started to hurt. And the laughing escalated. I couldn’t breathe properly, my stomach muscles were /aching/ and I honestly, really and truly thought I was going to die.
The icing on the cake was the fact that my laughing fit made our housemate nearly pee himself due to laughing.
I think this is it.
And it is pretty funny. The particular highlight to me was post #130
On the OP, I bought a single volume, complete transcript of Peter Cook’s work last Summer. That reduces me to a quivering jelly every time I pick it up, or even think about some of the highlights. (The Frog and Peach, “You remember World War 2 ? Ghastly business. I was dead against it, you know. I wrote a letter”).
The hardest I can remember laughing was a few months ago (short attention span, huh?) when I went to go watch Ice Age 2 with some of my friends.
When the sloth guy meets all the minisloths. That whole sequence, I was laughing hysterically, unable to breath, shoving my hand in my mouth so we don’t get kicked out of the theatre with my obscenely loud hyena hootinlaughter.
Four notable occasions stand out for me - in reverse order:
I’m not proud of this: my first ever experience of Catholic church, aged about 10. It was Easter midnight mass and me and my friend Joe were all hepped up on chocolate eggs and fizzy drinks. Nothing was particularly funny apart from the fact that we were meant to be sombre. Stifled hilarity is the most voracious, and feeds on itself. We tried to hold it in but sporadically, huge snorts of laughter escaped our noses like unwanted farts. Eventually it got so bad that we knew we had to leave, made a run for it, and ended up rolling around in the parking lot screaming with laughter. Then we melted a load of votive candles we’d stolen. We were a trifle grounded afterwards.
Otis Lee Crenshaw (aka Rich Hall) in Dublin, 2003 singing “show me on the doll where he touched you”. I get tears in my eyes thinking about it.
When, aged 13, I sneaked into a cinema under age to see a matinee of Airplane. I thought I would never be able to stop laughing, and that nothing could possibly top it. But it was a double bill, and Life of Brian came on immediately afterwards. I think I must have laughed enough for half a lifetime that afternoon. I literally fell off my seat and rolled in the aisles, on several occasions.
Billy Connolly live in Hong Kong, 1994. I recall it was about the Swiss being a bunch of devious bastards, and Toblerone chocolate being a plot to rip the roof off the mouths of unsuspecting consumers. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe; I do not exaggerate when I say that it was very nearly a medical emergency. I was doubled up underneath my seat in delicious agony, and my girlfriend was trying to express her concern for me, but was creased up laughing too hard to help. For the first time in my life, I just wanted Billy to shut the fuck up for a while so I could recover.
Two incidents come to mind.
The first was early last year. I was listening to the ridiculous Cab Calloway song Everybody Eats When They Come To My House for the first time:
*Have a banana, Hannah,
Try the salami, Tommy,
Give with the gravy, Davey,
Everybody eats when they come to my house!
Try a tomato, Plato,
Here’s cacciatore, Dori,
Taste the baloney, Tony,
Everybody eats when they come to my house! *
I laughed so hard that I fell over in my chair and burned my arm on the radiator. I still have the scar, about an inch long, on my forearm.
The second, last night. My friends and I were watching the special features disc of the first season of Twin Peaks. There was an interview with one of the cast members, and during the interview he was eating a loaf of sourdough bread. What we often do when we see amusing things on DVDs is, we play them backwards at half speed. Anyway, we played this interview at half speed, backwards, and the guy was taking the bread out of his mouth instead of putting it in. This sent me into convulsions of laughter.
Me and a couple of friends puffed furiously on a joint in my car, then ran in to see The Life of Brian when it first came out. We were cracking up before we even sat down during the opening credits. We roared through the whole movie.
A silly conversation with my GF this summer that led to impressions of the Movietone trailer V.O. guy doing his thing for porn films.
I lost my legs, slid down the wall, and laughed hard until my abdominal muscles screamed in protest and a blood vessel in my eye broke. :o
She kept it up throughout, too. It was like verbal tickling. I thought I’d die.
I was watching a retrospective of the Carol Burnett Show several years ago, and the actors all agreed the worst crack-up was during a “Mama’s Family” skit, which they then showed. I don’t remember the premise of the skit, but at one point, Tom Conway just started ad libbing like crazy about circul elephants. Harvey Korman started cracking up, and Conway just hijacked the skit and wandered out into left field with it. Korman was wrecked, Burnett had forgotten her lines and Conway had just hit his stride when Vickie Lawrence, who had sat stone-faced the whole time, said in her most sassy Mama voice, “Don’t this little shit ever shut up?”
I was already laughing so hard it was hard to catch my breath, but when she cracked that ad lib, Korman slid to the floor, Burnett simply turned away and doubled over with laughter, and Lawrence just sat there looking pissed. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t catch my breath and ended up rolling around on the sofa, clasping my sides and convulsing.
I believe that moment is the single funniest moment in television history.
Playing pictionary w/family many years ago, with my brother Kilvert’s Pagan as a partner (really unfair, because we both think in the same, occasionally twisted way), I laughed so hard I blacked out for a second or two. The word was “Mutiny”, as I recall - just drew a stick figure flipping off a stick figure in a vaguely military hat. KP got it instantly. Kind of irked my dad.
Playing pictionary w/family many years ago, with my brother Kilvert’s Pagan as a partner (really unfair, because we both think in the same, occasionally twisted way), I laughed so hard I blacked out for a second or two. The word was “Mutiny”, as I recall - just drew a stick figure flipping off a stick figure in a vaguely military hat. KP got it instantly. Kind of irked my dad.
I don’t think Korman could keep a straight face if you paid him, and sometimes I wonder if Conway didn’t take advantage of that. I remember one skit where they were both playing snooty butlers and the doorbell rang and Conway went to open it. He was wearing gloves, and part of the gag was he was unable to turn this huge, tire-sized doorknob to open the door.
He keeps whipping his gloved hands over the door knob, then climbs on top of the door knob, straddles it like he’s riding a pony, and begins to sway his whole body side to side in an attempt to open the door with his thighs.
Korman, in his butler uniform, walks halfway across the stage and just freezes. His face is red, his eyes are screwed up, and he’s shaking as he faces Conway, tilting from side to side as he sits on top of the doorknob. It’s almost as if he knew if he took one more step he would collapse to the stage, screaming.
I was just thinking of that routine myself. The Siamese elephants that were joined at the trunk. A little monkey would come out and dance on the trunks. (Actors are obviously struggling to maintain their composure at this point). They couldn’t go (insert elephant trumpeting noise here), they’d just go SNORK.
Kills me to this day.
Other things, in no particular order:
Hanging out with my close buddies. We clown around and about half the time wind up howling with laughter.
The first time I read the “Hotel Soap” story.
Watching “Bad Santa” with my buddy, we were still wiping tears from our eyes an hour after we left the theatre.
A quiet Friday at work when I started running all the pompous managerial emails through the “Dialectizer” and sending them around to my coworkers. We’d read them aloud in our best “Swedish Chef” accent. For weeks just saying “Um bork bork bork” would cause people to dissolve in laughter.
On a related note, I think SNL is at it’s funniest when the actors lose it on stage. Sometimes it’s funnier to watch someone try to not laugh and keep acting than it is to watch them being funny. I remember one sketch with Lindsay Lohan as a guest, and at some point, she was trying not to laugh for about 30 seconds before running off stage (I think it was the sketch about the girl who finds the worst side of everything).
What made it funnier was that the girl playing the depressing girl was able to keep a straight face and continue the sketch even with the others giggling (at least, that’s how I remember it; I saw it 2+ years ago)
On a related note, I’ve been watching the Letterman show lately, and his interview with Ann Heche was great, just because he couldn’t seem to form a coherent thought, just sorta stammering nervously while she make lesbian jokes and more or less ran that portion of the show. On a later episode, during “Ventriloquist Week”, there was this one guy who’s dummy kept pointint out what a bad ventriloquist the guy was. At one point, they’re doing a musical bit, and the ventriloquist talks about how he’s gonna slap out the beat of the song on his knee, make some sort of rythmic sound with his lips, and the dummy was going to hum the song.
After a long pause, complete with the dummy turning towards Dave and nodding at the Ventriloquist as if to ask “Is this guy for real?” he slowly turns back to the ventriloquist and comments, deadpan:
“I’d like to see that.”
I can remember on first seeing Monty Python literally ending up on the floor laughing when the phrase wasn’t in common usage.
Speaking of actors who can’t keep a straight face, watch the great Betty White utterly demolish Bea Arthur and Rue McClanahan with one of her great St. Olaf Stories.
Dave Letterman show, Demi Moore comes on nearly 9 months pregnant, she looks fantastic and tells Dave she’s been doing gymnastics to keep in shape… wanna see? so she runs off stage then “she” come back back flipping across the stage - I wee-wee-ed.
She came back again a few months later with the baby strapped to her chest and did the same thing again …
The Simpsons ep where Bart and Homer convert to Catholicism - the Priests speech about how he became a priest had me in hysterics you fight like your mother, she couldn’t take a punch! OWTTE then when Marge imagined Catholic Heaven I nearly halved myself in three screaming laughing…
You Had To Be There - I went to a leisure pool complex thing with a friend and his kids - I went down one water slide first and waited for my friend to appear - he shot out of the end of the tube so fast he did a back flip into the ‘landing pool’, I was convinced his shorts had come off and quite lidderaly there folks wee-ed myself laughing. I tried to explain why I was laughing [his shorts having not fallen off] and went into such convulsions I fell over and started hyperventilating. One lifeguard came to see what was wrong …
Oh and Bill Cosby’s book Parenthood - the bit about thinking he and his brother were called Jesus Christ and Goddammit
First time I ever came across the expression “set light to your farts”
I think we can all agree that The Moment You Laughed Hardest In Life often has nothing at all to do with how funny the actual trigger event is.
Once I saw something that made me laugh so hard I was crying and (TMI here) my nose looked like it had shoelaces hanging out of it. I was on the phone with my wife at the time and she kept saying, What? What IS it?" and I couldn’t get it together long enough to tell her. A couple of times I gasped out, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me - it really isn’t that funny.” Even in the midst of my fit, I knew that the line wasn’t worthy of my reaction.
The line was “Don’t sweat the petty things, and don’t pet sweaty things.” Now it only makes me smirk. It’s like trying to remember how something felt when you were stoned, I imagine.
Has no one mentioned The Horror of Blimps? I just re-read it, and it still makes me laugh until I literally wheeze and cry.
I did actually fall off the couch laughing once, when we saw There’s Something About Mary. Somehow the hilarity of poor Ben Stiller’s situation with his zipper, and then the shock that they actually showed it made me laugh so hard I slid onto the floor.
“Is that a leg?”
I’ve mentioned this one before, but one Easter in high school, during Easter Sunday Mass, the offertory procession included someone carrying something similar to this. This struck me as hilarious and of course it’s not the place to start laughing. My stifled laughter shook the pew violently and set my mom off. Pop was sitting between us and for the first time ever he let out a little snortle. Even the people sitting behind us caught the bug. It was wonderful.
