Albert Brooks had a lot of funny scenes in Defending Your Life (1991). He’s a very funny guy. Wish he and his brother Bob “Super Dave Osborne” Einstein (equally funny) collaborated on more projects.
Not a lot of meat on 'em, but what there is is mighty flavorful.
Or so I hear.
One of my all time favorites. I had a similar reaction to a scene in that movie where he’s asked what became of a major investment he made in cattle.
Brooks reluctantly explains, “I never got a straight answer. All I know is their teeth fell out.”
Fact #1: one of the Japanese words for rice is “gohan.”
Fact #2: the Japanese word for bread is “pan”, courtesy of Portuguese missionaries who introduced bread from Europe a few hundred years ago.
Fact #3: Japan loves portmanteaus. Example, “pasokon” is one of their words for “personal computer.”
So that’s the setup. A few years ago my wife was telling me about a new Japanese bread-making machine that uses rice and/or rice powder (instead of wheat flour) to make bread.
So what did they name their product?
Gopan.
The instant she told me the name I started laughing and it went on and on for minutes. Can’t breathe, abs are getting sore, eyes tearing up, muscles on the back of my skull cramping up.
Am I missing something?
Y’know, I never wanted to go to church, but I can’t say I never had a good time. 
My almost-got-fired-but-contained-my-amusement moment came some years back in a meeting with a truly terrible overbearing micromanaging principal. She called me and our technology teacher into a meeting and explained that she wanted to set up a system where tech-challenged teachers could get support. “At my old school,” she explained, “We had the SWAT team, Students Who Assist Technology. I want to set something like that up, only with teachers.”
The tech teacher and I worked out the acronym around the same time, glanced side-eyed at each other, and through heroic effort did not lose our shit. But I still giggle thinking about that meeting.
I am probably cerebrally damaged somehow in the humor department. Most of what’s supposed to be funny doesn’t hit me as such, but meanwhile the things that I do find hilarious are pretty 3rd-grade (or younger) audience type material. I giggled my head off back when Damn You AutoCorrect was online, just reading the garbled texts and the silly/embarrassing things autocorrect had inserted.
Many years ago when I worked in a hospital, a female co-worker walked into a patient room to find the male patient masturbating. She turned around and went back into the hallway where she encountered me.
Of course she told me what happened. As she did, when she came to the “he was jacking off” part, she made dramatic, exaggerated motions of male masturbation. In the busy hallway.
I said, “you know, you don’t really have to demonstrate it to me.”
She hadn’t realized what she was doing. Neither one of us could stop laughing. We had to physically separate ourselves from each other to recover.
mmm
They say the essence of humor is an unexpected connection or unexpected dissonance.
I think of our minds as being full of ideas in a sort of idea space. And there’s some notion of distance, where any two ideas are X idea-units apart from one another. Some close, some far, some very far.
Ordinary prose may be mildly connective/dissonant and not strike us funny. Small unexpected jumps produce a chuckle. Bigger jumps produce a LOL. I think the ones that just leave us giddy are ones that somehow make a truly great leap across idea-space in our minds, but do so in a peculiar, maybe detoured, fashion. And since everyone’s mind is different, whether e.g. “Gopan” is hilarious or merely clever marketing-speak depends on one’s individual peculiarities.
I’m embarrassed to admit this, but several years ago, my dad told this terrible dad joke where the punchline was “Basil Nasal and his nine nasty nose pickers”. I can’t remember the set up but I was snorting with laughter for at least fifteen minutes. At least my sinuses cleared out.
Yeah, something like that. The moment I heard it, one thought occurred to me - “well of course they would call it that” - and at the same time it sounded to me like a Hindi word (it helped that I knew someone named Rajagopalan), which I guess made it seem like a completely arbitrary choice.
I’m not sure that the average Japanese person would find the name particularly funny - but my wife found my paroxysmal laughter to be extremely contagious at the time.
Yup.
Many years ago, I was working in a vineyard, when I came across a plant growing as a weed in the grape rows. I no longer remember what the plant was; but it was something common that I saw all the time – as a low-growing plant, maybe 6 inches high.
This particular example was a good three feet tall.
This, for whatever reason, struck me as so funny that I sat down in the row and laughed hysterically for a good ten minutes; to the great confusion of the rest of the vineyard crew, none of whom could see anything funny about it. And I don’t know why I did, or do; but I’m snickering a little now, thinking about it.
At my father’s funeral, the rabbi said (probably not exact quote): “There are three ways to mourn. You can weep. You can rage. Or you can laugh.”
– I realized at the funeral that, being the klutz that I am, I had managed to spill something on my clothes, causing a visible strain. My mother, seeing me notice this, leaned over and whispered to me “It’s all right. He probably wouldn’t have recognized you without it.” Yup, we laughed; though it wasn’t one of the long uncontrollable fits.
Every time I see this, I laugh for an hour or two. I don’t know why
I’ve got 2 posters and a T-Shirt
My wife says that I laugh hardest at things I say. There’s some truth to that. I read in either a Book of Lists or Bathroom Reader of a man who laughed so hard “at a jest he had made” that he died. I hope I don’t meet the same fate.
^^^ Nervous reaction, considered poor form by some people. I do it too, and have been trying not to for a long time.
I prefer to believe that my jests are just endlessly hilarious. I never said others didn’t laugh at them as well, I just laugh harder.
That is a knee-slapper [/backs away, slowly]
It’s not just you. I think those are hilarious as well. I’m not sure if the issue is that I find all forms of wordplay especially funny or if there’s a 13-year-old boy inside me screaming to get out.
Chicken butt. Chicken butt. Chicken butt.
::snert::