Oh yes- the Horror of Blimps. If that’s not the hardest I’ve ever laughed, it’s in the top five.
I stumbled across a link to “Threadspotting” years ago with a tag line of “How to Kill Evil Nazi Groundhogs”. While snickering at the rather ingenious methods of groundhog killing I hit the post where the OP told of his problems with Pterodactyls being attracted by the bodies of the dead groundhogs. This struck me so funny I almost fell out of my chair and proceeded to try unsuccessfully tell the wife what had me so torn up for the next half hour or so.
Sadly this topic shows up in the threadspotting archive but is a broken link.
The hardest I ever laughed here was when someone, and I SO wish I could remember who, posted that they’d seen graffiti on a warm-air hand dryer in a bathroom: Press Button, Receive Bacon. It was so completely unexpected that I was howling, and my daughter came into the room to ask me what was so funny. It seriously took me five tries to read the post to her, because I’d get to “and someone had written… they wrote…(gasp) … it said… .BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!” Occasionally now, my daughter will try to kill me by exiting a public restroom and casually saying something like “The bacon dispenser in there is broken.”
Off-board laughter: a group of friends were over and we were playing Taboo. If you’ve never played, it’s a game where you are given a card with a word or phrase for your teammates to guess and a short list of words you CANNOT say while trying to get them to guess. My friend Lee was overtired and getting bored with the game, so he started throwing in the word “penis” as his guess… which was mildly funny, but then gradually escalated into a series of penis-related jokes, none of which I can remember, but each of which added another dose of the giggles to the game. Finally, Lee’s wife Karen was gasping with laughter and she said, “That’s it, you guys, I am going to die if you don’t stop! No more penis jokes!” Gradually we all regained control from our laughing fits, and Karen handed me the next card. I looked down at the card and saw “erector set.”
Someone else will remember the play, but one memorable gigglefest was when my father tried to read the part where the guy is telling the tailor who made him a pair of pants “you made a bollocks of the fly”.
Whatching the 70s British comedy The Goodies. Not that it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen, but it was when it was new and i was eight years-old. As far as “laughing until it hurts” goes, I remember that it got to some serious stomach pain, and I was in a foetal position on the lounge room floor, doubled over further than is healthy, and actually starting to get scared!
I’ve since seen the shows as an adult, and dated as it is, I still get a giggle - especially when I get more of the references.
Hard to pick - I’ve done a lot of laughing -including at the Blimp story here just a while ago - still a little sore from that.
First time I remember - listening to Bill Cosby’s routine about the Ark. Fourth time (or so) God says ‘Noah’. Thinking about ‘Noah’s’ response still sets me off.
Other memorable episodes of hilarity - Peter Sellers’ The Party (absolutely worth a rental if you’ve never seen it). The dinner party with the drunken waiter and ‘num num’ to the birdie.
Tim Conway & Harvey Korman - many of their skits; I especially remember my dad laughing 'till he cried at the dentist skit and I was similarly afflicted.
Python’s Dead Parrot sketch.
The (original) In-Laws. Who knew Arkin and Falk would be funny? I still giggle at ‘Serpentine’.
So many Dave Barry pieces - I used to avoid eating when I read his columns lest I inhale my food and perish. I recall reading his piece on fishing shows (haven’t found it since) when I was on break at work. Library clients were coming to my office to find out what was causing all the howling.
Lots of Whose Line - esp. Ryan Stiles and Colin Mochrie. But I laughed hardest when they had audience members attempt to do sound effects.
A show by Sandra Shamas at the NAC in Ottawa. The mid-show intermission was badly needed because we were breathless and in pain from laughing.
Richard Jeni does a hilarious bit about sitting in a hotel watching one of the awful Jaws sequels.
Jerry van Amerongen often cracks me up completely. He’s just so silly.
One more church giggles episode - another Easter Midnight Mass (funny how these have been a theme). We’re in the first row of the balcony. Watching the processional. Beneath us emerges a lily held aloft in the hands of a bearer. Friend whispers ‘behold the potted plant’. Roughly 40 minutes of being utterly unable to look at one another without starting into further paroxysms of shaking, muffled, tear-inducing spasms ensued.
I’m sure it’s been mentioned already, but Richard Simmons on Whose Line. And Richard Simmons on Letterman. And Jerry van Dyke on Letterman.
Oh, man, that reminds me of one: the Red vs. Blue Thanksgiving episode from a few years back, where Sarge takes the “turducken” thing to an insane new level. “First, we start with a hummingbird, put that in a sparrow, stuff them both in a cornish hen…” I thought I’d die by the time he got to the pterodactyl.
Watching the Short Haired Judy episode of Curb Your Enthusiam. I’m not even going to attempt a description. I couldn’t breathe! I rewound several parts numerous times. I even watched it again the next day, sure that the effect would be at least somewhat diminished. Not so!
Merry Christmas, Mr. Bean. The Nativity set scene is just a knockout!
“What, TWO turkeys?!” 
Hmm, funniest moments…
Hearing Billy Connolly belt out “Ohhhhh Old McDonald was dyslexic EOIOE!” the first time.
Listening to some of The Frantics old radio shows. “Welcome to heaven, join your fellow Presbeterians.” “But I’m Catholic.” “Oh, well, go to hell.”
The first time I saw Airplane.
The time a friend punched a vampire out in a haunted house probably tops the list though. I was in high school, and a bunch of us went to this haunted house. We were walking along when we came to this crypt section. The path was narow and lined with coffins, and we were walking single file. In the middle of our group, one of the coffins suddenly flew open and up jumped a vampire. The girl who happened to be standing right next to the coffin screamed bloody murder, punched the vampire dead in the stomach, and ran down the corridor screaming. The vampire collapsed back into the coffins with a surprised ‘Oof!’, and the lid closed. Those of us in the back who happened to witness this went dead silent for a second, and then collapsed laughing. After a minute we got up, knocked on the coffin, apologized for our friend, and laughed our way through the rest of the haunted house. None of it was scary anymore. To this day, haunted houses do nothing for me, because I keep seeing this girl punching out a vampire.
The OJ Simpson on the boat scene in The Naked Gun. When he steps into the bear trap and falls into the wedding cake…
Wally and the gerbil (thread apparently deleted).
Previously mentioned Fawlty Towers “Germans” and Tim Conway’s Siamese elephants.
Whose Line - Drew doing Jerry Lewis as a moyel.
I can remember four distinct times…
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There’s this stupid joke about building a house, and what to do with the one leftover brick- the punchline is, “so he threw the brick far, far away”. The joke itself is not a typical joke, and it seems that about 5% of people find it uproariously funny and about 95% just go “huh?”. Most of my friends just go huh, but there’s one other friend of mine who has the same sense of humor I do, she cracked up just telling me, and I think I laughed for a half-hour straight, rolling on her bed, trying to catch my breath.
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The Marx brothers film A Night at the Opera- the scene where everyone crowds into Groucho’s tiny little room on the ocean liner and then his date comes by and opens the door and 20 people fall out- I usually don’t find gags like that amusing but this one was something else!
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One of the latest episodes of Real World Denver wherein Brooke wears a sexy outfit on the street to look for a nail salon, winds up getting lost, a couple of black guys whistle at her, and then she makes her way home, grumpy and upset. When she gets home, she gets more and more worked up, eventually calling her mother, hysterical, in tears, stammering, “MOM? I’m… in… HELL!” The mother is all horrified, “Honey, what happened??” Imagine getting that call from your daughter and it’s about getting lost on your way to the nail salon!
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My boyfriend has very picky eating habits. We were recently sharing a box of godiva chocolates and he was only eating the plain-chocolate pieces, no filled ones or truffles, because he doesn’t like chocolate with fillings. I pointed one out that looked solid, he bit halfway into it, screamed “eww!”, and threw the half-chocolate across the table, a thin stream of caramel dangling from his screwed-up mouth. I think I laughed a year off my life.
The Blue Collar Comedy Tour. The original tour, before it became a merchandising line. Never heard of Ron White before, heard of Larry the Cable Guy but never heard any of his routines, but decided that Bill Engvall and Jeff Foxworthy were worth the cost of the tickets. Spent 3 hours laughing. The end of the show, with all 4 of them sitting on stage trying to upstage each other almost killed me, I couldn’t stop laughing long enought to catch my breath.
I bought the CD of the tour, and parts of it can still set me off.
Along with the classic Horror of Blimps, there is When Furniture Attacks by the Master Wang-Ka.
That joke is told in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, though I’ve never thought of it as much of a laugh-riot; it may have been lifted from somewhere else.
For me, I can think of two times that made me laugh as hard as it’s possible for a human to laugh without dying:
One was watching The Aristocrats.
The other was about six years ago, after a Memphis Tigers basketball game. I’d gone to the game with three friends, and we were the only people on the bus back to where we’d parked. I can’t remember one single thing we talked about; I just remember the four of us, doubled over and wheezing and screaming and crying with the pain of laughing so hard. Oddly, none of us had had anything to drink that night, either.
It was more of a had-to-be-there; my father is usually pretty sober and only occasionally do he and mom coincide on being struck amused by something.
Thanks, I knew someone would know!
I remembered another one, from The Critic. He’s at his son’s school, in the sports stadium. Someone is talking about how wonderful the school is, such diversity–they even have kids from Easter Island! Switch to a view of a kid in the stands who looked like the Easter Island statues.
The time I remember laughing hardest was, as others have noted, not caused by the absolutely funniest thing I ever witnessed. It was brought on mainly by speed and surprise.
I was watching a DVD of the Chris Farely movie Tommy Boy. It’s important to note that Farely’s humor, though I’m sure many people like it, is not usually my cup of tea. I was mildly amused for most of the movie, but nothing more. Until the moment, of course.
For those unfamiliar with the movie, a little bit of plot outline (followed by a spoiler box) is in order. Farley’s character is the feckless, idiot son of a beloved, successful, and recently deceased businessman. The arc of the movie requires him to make a complete hash out of his father’s business before finally finding a way to succeed on his own terms. This is important because, in such a story arc, one expects a fairly typical formula to play out.
The bad guy is trying to screw Tommy Boy out of his inheritance, but he’s also trying to move in on the girl Tommy has his eye on. The bad guy is suave and sucessful, at least by the movie’s standards. While Tommy Boy is out trying (unsuccessfully) to sell product, the bad guy saunters into the girl’s office to make a play for her affection.
Typically how this would work out is that he’d get just enough of her attention to make the hero feel threatened and break out of his fugue…she’d agree to go out with him, but she’d never quite wind up selling her soul. It’s a cliché, but this was a clichéd movie
Did I mention it’s an old office? It’s a fusty and old-fashioned building.
[spoiler]So the bad guy walks in and smoothly starts his snappy patter. The girl is working at her desk, but half paying attention to him. He sits on the corner of a nearby desk and leans back to show off his physique. She finishes her work and turns to face the villain, pressing a button on the old-style pneumatic tube message-delivery system in much the same way we’d send an e-mail before turning away from our computers. There’s just enough time to think, “Hey! I haven’t seen one of THOSE in…”
The bad guy’s shirt is instantly sucked off his body and disappears up the pneumatic tube behind him. INSTANTLY – it’s gone so fast you can barely tell what’s happened.
And there he sits, barechested, stunned, completely unable to continue with his seduction.
And then he doesn’t even try – he just gets up and leaves, wordlessly.[/spoiler]
It wasn’t the funniest thing ever. But it went against the cliché I expected, it happened so blazingly fast, and the villain’s reaction was so unexpected…I laughed.
And laughed. Harder and harder. “He just – heeeeeee…it…uh…gasp,” I explained. my wife stared at me and waited for me to become verbal.
But it didn’t happen, not right away. For some reason, I just spasmed harder with suppressed laughter. “His…it…!”
After about 15 minutes, my wife and I are both crying and gasping, still unable to complete any actual sentences out loud. I felt like I was having dry heaves or something – it was still funny, but the sensation was starting to be not entirely pleasant. Not that I could stop of my own free will.
The sheer contrast between the relatively un-funny movie (it’s actually kind of sweet and sad for most of the movie) and the blinding speed of the completely out-of-left-field scene made it all the funnier. And the fact that I’d gone from mildly-interested-at-best into this paroxysm almost as quickly, and still couldn’t explain it, was even funnier.
Eventually I got calmed down, and was able to take full breaths again, but not before my wife began wondering if she should call 911.
Timing is everything.
Sailboat
Same thing here for this American kid; specifically, it was the moment the Scotsman appeared in the Ecky Thump episode.
Second hardest I ever laughed: the nude wrestling scene in Borat.
Third hardest: the Running of the Jew scene in Borat.