I somehow totally missed his standup, until I heard this while driving, and had to pull over… so excited to find this (from The Flip Wilson Show)!
I’ve always loved Brooks’ comedy. He also excelled at prop humor, which usually falls flat for me with other comedians (I’m looking at you, Carrot Top).
His ventriloquist bit from way back still has me rolling.
And, of course, in addition to Defending Your Life
(mentioned above), Lost in America is also chock full of funny Brooks scenes: Admonishing the wife for losing the family nest egg. Trying to convince the casino to give back the nest egg. Funny stuff!
[FWIW: I do enjoy some of Carrot Top’s routines.]
Yes, that’s how I interpreted your post.
One time when I remember going into really hysterical laughter was when I was 9. I was reading my latest issue of “J’aime Lire” (a French language educational series for children). It was Issue 14 of the Canadian edition In the comic about the brother and sister Tom-Tom and Nana, and in this one they go too far in suppressing distractions so that Tom-Tom can study his multiplication table. They see their chef father’s big Christmas cake, and in order to make it less “distracting”, they put a sign which says “caca boudin” on the cake. Caca means “poo poo” in French and boudin means blood sausage, but this is actually just a pejorative used by French children. One way or another I nearly busted a gut when I read “caca”.
The time I recall when I most laughed in my life was about 21 years ago. I was still religious at the time and was a member of an Orthodox Christian newsgroup. Someone, eager to show how Judaism is hostile to Christianity, once posted anti-Christian quotes from the Talmud. One went more or less like this: X son of Y had a mind to convert to Judaism. With the help of some incantations, he raised Jesus from the dead. “How are you punished?” He replied: “With boiling hot excrement, because a master once said that whoever scorns the words of the sages shall be punished with boiling hot excrement”. I burst out laughing right there in the library where I was sitting. I couldn’t contain my laughter on the way home in the subway, and then, when I was closer to home, I threw myself down on the ground, and rolled around on the ground, still in hysterics. And that wasn’t quite the end of it!
As you can see, In younger days I had a tendency to respond to scatological humor. I think in both situations, the thing that made me laugh so much was the context in which it was written.
I do sometimes worry about laughing in inappropriate places—like Mary did, at Chuckles the Clown’s funeral.
It hasn’t happened yet, but I’ve come close. Nobody had better laugh at my funeral, though I am planning some sort of pop-out-the-casket prank.
Not quite at convulsive levels, but I can’t stop laughing at this sequence from Raising Arizona.
It’s the biker from hell! Notice that when the motorcycle’s front wheel is raised, we hear something that sounds like an angry bear (0:19 in the video). The part that has me laughing so much is the ululation heard just after they jump out of the car (1:03).
Tip: Designate your funeral song as “Pop Goes the Weasel”.
mmm
I was out to lunch with my brother and sister one time, and my brother mentioned watching a movie in Spanish called Los Increibles. Very obviously The Incredibles, which is why I was caught completely off guard and sent into convulsions of laughter when my sister responded with “The Amazings?” and my brother said “No, the Incredibles.”
(For those of you wondering: Instead of making the obvious connection, that increible sounds very similar to the English word incredible and was also the title of a recently made movie, my sister instead made the connection that increible sounds like the French word incroyable and then attempted to translate that into English. She’s a native English speaker, so I have no clue why her mind decided to go in that direction.)
I went to see Blazing Saddles in the theatre when it first came out. I laughed so hard at the bean eating scene that I fell out of my seat into the aisle.
Watching The Emperor’s New Groove for the first time. I had to ask my kids to pause the movie for a few moments after the line, “Don’t you say a word.”
Doesn’t Bomb Voyage call Mr Incredible ‘Monsieur Incroyable’ in the film?