When have you laughed inappropriately?

In My Humble Opinion
61

More than once, when younger ( teens and twenties ) I’d stifle grins and laughter when telling someone that someone else had died. I just wasn’t capable of doing it the right way.

However, twice when I was 17/18 I was told that a friend of mine had died, and there was no giggling then. Just horror. So I think it was something about handling the enormous responsibility of that knowledge and the emotional tide that went with it, that made me grin.

Unfortunately, I know how to give such news now.

Cartooniverse

62

Probably one of those “ya had to be there” things, but another death-related spasm of hysterical laughter.

My father died after a long fight with cancer. Very harrowing, and it didn’t help at all that the funeral home we usually used was very ticked that he specified no embalming, cardboard casket, cremation and my sister and I to scatter his ashes. Lousy profit margin for them, I guess, but they dragged us through hell. They made us identify his untouched, unembalmed body three separate times of over four days.

The funeral director, hereafter known as Lurch, kept hassling my sister and I about how horrible his ashes would be. 'Scuse me, the funeral biz doesn’t deal in anything as mundane as ashes: ‘cremains’, with visible bits and chunks left, so there! He waxed eloquent about the horrors of the retorts etc, and that’s about time my tender-hearted sister’s face turned the color of salt and she started swaying, a micron away from fainting. I wasn’t much better, as my former academic training included human osteology. It’s one thing to identify bone fragments; it’s quite another when they belong to one’s very recently deceased father.

So we were already about as strung out as people could be from the heartache of his death; had hardly slept or eaten in almost a week. Now Lurch added a nice load of pure terror and dread on top.

We finally get the call from Lurch that ‘the cremains’, formerly our father, were ready to picked up. We show up at his office; he brusquely directs us out the back door to wait. Which we did, for an excruciating 15 minutes, both of us on the verge of dry heaves, passing out or just breaking down in tears again. Lurch finally shows up at the back door, apparently having had to fetch ‘the cremains’ from another zip code, bearing a box in his hand and a sneer on his face.

My poor sister, shaking like a leaf in a high wind, took one look at the box in Lurch’s hands and blurted, “Oh shit, they gift-wrapped Daddy!”

Two beats later both of us were wailing with laughter. I mean, howling, gasping, hiccuping, tears-down-the-face, from-the-gut waves of gusting laughter that just rolled on and on and on. The sight of Lurch’s outraged face, Dad’s box still clutched in his hands like a waiter with a tray of turd canapes, set us right off again.

Dad would have loved it.

Veb
And ‘the cremains’ weren’t scary or bad at all. Lurch was a lying, greedy jerk.

63

Veb, I believe I’ve mentioned that you’re one of my hero’s before, but if I haven’t… You are. Really.

And I think that’s completely appropriate. Maybe I’m just snide. Maybe I’m letting my dislike of the funary(sp) industry color my reactions, but still. I’d have lost it, too.

64

Thanks, OtakuLoki, that’s really kind of you! No kidding, misery loves company or something. I’ve gotten a lot of inadvertant bellylaughs from this thread, not to mention some consolation about cracking up and trying to stifle laughter at precisely the wrong times. I about rolled off the chair over jsgoddess’s “Death Valley Spa and Health Resort”.

FWIW, gift wrap in general has become a reliable source of family hilarity. It lends a distinctly surreal note to Christmas and birthdays. “They didn’t put holly sprigs/teddy bears/whatever on Dad!” Hallmark stores across the country probably have our mugshots in the backroom, with a red circle-bisected-by-diagonal-slash across the faces.

This thread is a hoot.

Veb

65

This is a church one- I didn’t grow up in the church, and frankly churches (particularly Catholic) with their huge statues of bleeding Jesus and such just used to scare the shit right out of me. Priests in their ornate robes and incense burning swingy things? Get me the hell OUTTA there.

So my ex husband and I had to go and meet with his priests because we were getting married and I was not Catholic. We met with them separately, they quizzed me and made me feel awful about not being Catholic and tried pressuring me into signing papers I didn’t want to sign- just awful. I was very shaken by the time it was all over and just wanted to BOLT out of the church.

So ex husband and I are in the priest’s office area, and they (two priests) are saying goodbye and blah blah blah. ALL OF A SUDDEN, one of them puts his hand on my head and starts this crazy assed sounding chanting in latin- some sort of prayer, I guess. I’m standing there dumbstruck, stressed to the point of snapping, and all of a sudden in my head I hear the priest from the Exorcist screaming “THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU! THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU!” and I just fucking lost it. Right there in that stuffy little room with the three of them looking at me like I’d been raised by wolves. Never in my life have I needed to escape a place like that room. Gah!

66

Now I know the next time I’m doing it, I’m going to remember this story, picture King George, and start giggling in the midst of the amour. Thanks. :smiley:

67

A dumb cow-orker was going off on me at work for no real reason, and kept screaming that I was a “fucking bitch.” In the middle of standing there saying nothing, I realized she was wearing a pair a Fubu jeans with a big "FB on her cow’s ass. FB=Fucking Bitch.

I totally lost it, had to go outside and starting laughing so hard I was sitting on the curb, shaking. Someone sent my supervisor (the orker’s cousin) out to see if I was okay. I told her about it, and she just stood there shaking her head and biting her lip.

To this day, whenever I see a pair of Fubu jeans, I immediately thinking of the cow-orking Fucking Bitch and laugh.