Yeah, the hardest laughter to stop is the laughter that you have to stop.
I think the sidekick guy on “Coupling” did a rather apt description of it, being the reason why he hates going to funerals (knowing that he will invariably burst out into an uproariously innapropriate fit of hysterical laughter). 
Debbie Downer, right? Yep, I think Rachel Dratch lost it at least once playing the character in question.
I believe I heard the Reverend Billy C. Wirtz say that or something similar once and I was just going to post about him here. He may have said “always pet the sweaty things.” His humor is not for everyone.
My brother took me to a Reverend Billy C. Wirtz show. I laughed for two solid hours. The next day my face and abdomen were sore.
One of my favorite quotes is “It’s better to have loved and lost…than live the rest of your life with that crazy bitch form Hell!”
The most memorable times…
With my Dad and my brother, way back when we first got a PC. We didn’t have the internet (this was 92-93ish, we didn’t get internet until 1995), so Dad used to buy these CDs that had all kinds of apps and games and “neat junk”. (Remember those? NightOwl, CDRom Today, that kind of stuff?) Well, one of those CDs had the infamous Student Bloopers, Newspaper Headlines, and Real Insurance Claims.
Much choking, gasping, and tears ensued. My Dad would read each line aloud, and, especially with the student bloopers, would start cracking up before reaching the end of the sentence. I’m sure laughing with those two just enhanced the “funniness” of it all. My father is a quiet, gentle man, who has a very intelligent, dry, and subtle humour, so once he starts laughing hard, you pretty much have to join in. At least, my brother and I do, since we have the same sense of humour as Dad. I still laugh aloud when re-reading those student bloopers. Damn, they’re pretty good.
Other times… well. I’ve told these before here, but they’re pretty good. I had a (now ex-) friend who was an abuser of the English language. It was enormous fun, and always caught me off guard:
Rigamorale = Rigor mortis (“Don’t mind [the dog] in the backseat, she just has to go through her whole *rigor mortis * first.”)
“Never lick a gift horse in the mouth”
“That’s just an old wise tale”
Too many more I’m just not remembering right now. These often resulted in me doing a spit-take (she always managed to say them when I was swigging my medium double-double!) and her looking at me strangely.
The hardest I’ve laughed in recent memory was just last week!
Background: I play World of Warcraft with some friends, and we use teamspeak/vent to speak to each other while playing. You can set this up to be push to talk, or to let it be voice activated. That night, I was voice activated, which is unusual for me because of the rugrats running around here. One guy was voice activated as well, the other, push to talk.
So, there are 3 of us on hanging out in teamspeak. The voice activated guy is a mouth breather. Loud. Heavy. I’ve heard it so much, I don’t hear it anymore. Push to talk guy, well he’s not so used to it. 10 mins or so go by. Finally push to talk guy sends me a whisper with something along the lines of “he’s breathing awfully hard and loud. WTH is he doing? Masterbating??”
I lost it. They both hear me. I’m sobbing. I was laughing so hard I was shaking and couldn’t control my mouse to open up the settings to change me to push to talk. My husband looks over at me like I’m crazy. I lose it again. Mouth breather sends me a whisper asking me what’s so funny. I lose it yet again.
While I am losing it and trying desperately to get myself under control, and trying to think of a reply to mouth breather’s question, I hear screaming from the bathroom. 16yro forgot to lock the bathroom door; 7 yro NEVER knocks, just opens door. Oldest begins his rant about personal privacy, knocking before entering, yadda, yadda, yadda. The 7yro matter-of-factly states: I knew you had furs down there. I see the mortification and shock on the 16yro’s face. I lost it. Oh my, how I lost it. Luckily, I had found the mute button on my mic.
This still makes me cry.
Oh my Og. That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in weeks.
I was about 12, watching TV at my friend’s house. The whole story is just too dumb to repeat and wouldn’t be entertaining anyway. Not even if you were 12 years old. Suffice it to say that my ribs ached for days.
Bill Bryson’s essay on a trip to Paris, read aloud to my wife. I just barely finished the thing, and I was weeping copiously by the end, having fallen over on the bed in great convulsions of laughter.
That was one sick bird.
Daniel
Is this the folks who created The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)? If so, that’s definitely up there on my list. A spectacular local company (the only local theater I go to any more) put on a production of this piece that had me and my wife in hysterics.
High humor.
Daniel
Oh that reminds me of one! I was in church with my family way back in my high school years. The long, dry sermon involved some discussion of “the monkey on your back.” At one point, the priest says “so, what will you do with your monkey? Will you ingore your monkey? Try to reason with your monkey? Fight your monkey?” My brother turns to me and says “I’d prefer to spank the monkey.”
I fought hard to control my laughter. The harder I tried to surpress it, the funnier it got. I bit my lip so hard it bled. I held my sides and was swaying back and forth trying to keep from bursting with laughter. Finally, I excused myself with some silly “feeling ill” explanation. I left the church and fell over with howling laughter.
I was a class-clown type growing up and surrounded myself with other class-clown types so I could probably write a book about The Top 500 Hardest Laughs I’ve Had without digging too deep into memory.
A few that come to mind:
One day I’ll be a good enough writer to write this one down and leave its hilarity intact, because it is damn funny. My sister bought a little remote control doohicky at a car wash once. All she saw was a picture of a guy getting shocked and - being the blonde of the family - that was enough for her. She ripped open the packaging and walked slyly up to my brother. She then proceeded to point the damn thing at him and and scream “Huh-ha!” as she pressed the button, thinking she just pulled off the prank of the century. Well, she of course is the one who got shocked and it scared her so badly she fell down and peed her pants. I believe she was 19 or 20 at the time.
Sitting in the theatre when Uncle Fucka came on. I knew they were going to push the limits in the movie but :eek:
Sitting in the theatre last weekend during the Old Man Balls bit in Jackass Number Two.
Sitting in the theatre watching The Big Lebowski when he drops a joint in his lap and runs his car into that garbage can. My brother and I were watching it together; he was home on leave from the Marines. I think we both laughed so hard because we could relate.
My sister’s friend - who has got to be the most air-headed girl on the planet - once finished relating a story with: I laughed so hard BOTH my heads nearly fell off! She wasn’t trying to make a joke.
Endless nights spent in Denny’s and Waffle House as a teenager, in the wee hours of the morning, at least mildly intoxicated.
Oh, if we can count intoxicated laughter, I’d have to say the time I watched Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster with my friend Joe on LSD at some point after 3:00am, giggling like fools and providing running commentary.
At one point, Bela Lugosi’s Mad Scientist had the protagonist strapped to a chair with what appeared to be a colander on his head. “The pervert’s giving him a permanent wave! His hair will smell funny for days!”
This hit us both exactly the right way and we did the holding-our-sides/gasping-for-air thing for about ten minutes.
I guess you had to be there. On acid.
I’m nearly on the floor just reading these stories. Thanks!
A Broadway show called “Defending The Caveman”. I laughed so hard at that show that my stomach literally hurt for days afterward.
If you get a chance to see this: beg, borrow or steal tickets to it!!!
The coffee can funeral in the Big Lebowski.
The death scene in Meaning of Life.
Mocking the movie “The People Under the Stairs”
Some of the Borat scenes in Ali G – “I will crush her.”
Some of the SNl 10th anniversary scenes – “White Like Me”, “Buddweiser”
I hadn’t seen Richard Simmons on Whose Line?, but it’s not bad.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8442381086256955513
Just recently, Mr. Carlyjay discovered Good Morning World.
Every time they check what’s in their mugs, I’m weeping with laughter.
In a band I played in a few years back, we used to hit the local Denny’s or IHOP after every gig, along with a few choice friends and whatever band(s) we were playing with – no hangers-on or groupies allowed. Those 2 A.M. chow sessions were always the scene of great hilarity. It was just something about the fatigue, the adrenalin buzz, the friends and (for some) the chemicals.
One night we were trading funny/gross (and for a bunch of twentysomething boys in punk rock bands, they’re the same thing) stories. My younger brother told us this story of being at Boy Scout camp a few summers before (he was 18 at the time). One of the guys in his Scout troop had somehow let his wallet fall into the latrine. Now, for those who aren’t familiar, we aren’t talking about a Jiffy John with blue water in it. We’re talking about a real outhouse, where you sit on a plank with a hole in it, and your turd drops about six feet into a huge, festering, maggoty pile of human offal left by the thirty other people who are sharing the latrine on any given week, and the thousands who have gone before. These latrines are never emptied – they couldn’t be. This kid had himself lowered headfirst into the pit to recover his wallet, which was sort of half-floating, half-buried on the surface. They removed the plank and two other scouts, one holding each ankle, lowered him in. With a flashlight in one hand, he gingerly searched around with the other until he got his wallet.
Someone broke in on my brother’s story and asked, “What if they’d dropped him in, headfirst like that? He would have died!” Someone else chimed in, “Yeah, can you imagine…dying in shit?!?” And with that, none of us could form a complete sentence for at least 20 minutes. Between cackles and gasps for breath, some of us attempted to speculate as to the following:
…and so on. It’s one of those things that doesn’t seem as funny when I type it now, but at the time, it was absolutely convulsive.
I was at a friend’s house and we were playing Trivial Pursuit. The question I got was (something like), “What do plastic surgeons remove over 40 tons of per year?” I replied immediately, and with great certainty, “Moles!” and my friend said, “Moles???” …and, I dunno…just imagining what 40 tons of piled up moles must look like…I laughed so hard I scared myself because I couldn’t breathe (for a LONG time)
p.s. the answer was “fat”.
Once I was at a farewell party for a friend going to Germany on an exchange program. Mischievious teens that we were, we got someone to bring beer to the party. After about 3 or 4 beers, someone puts on the comedy album “Eddie Murphy - Delirious”.
We were all getting some good laughs from the album. Then it came to the part where Eddie is describing his Aunt Bunny’s fall down the stairs, complete with thump, bumps, and “Help me Lord Jesus!”. I started a giggle fit so paralyzing that I was spasming on the floor for 5 minutes. The next day, my chest muscles were sore from the laughing.
Another real-life giggle-fest: I had a friend named Bob Screws. Funny enough by itself, but it gets better.
He had been elected to the head of the state chapter of DeMolay (a Masonic-related youth group for boys). The installation of officers is a very pomp-and-circumstance ceremony, followed by a session of formal introduction of honored guests. Being very family oriented, one’s family is also introduced.
So when it came time to introduce his family, he asked them all to stand. Then, going around the room, he introduces them one by one. Paraphrasing: “This is my father, John Screws, my mother Eileen Screws, my brother Tom Screws, my uncle Peter Screws…”
Everyone else is serious-minded enough not to see the humor. But little pervert me is in the back row of my section bent over giggling and trying not to be heard.