Sometimes, in some places, on certain occasions, it’s completely inappropriate to laugh.
Unfortunately, this is precisely when it is the most difficult and painful to contain it. We have all experienced the agony of pent-up laughter trying to escape our souls. The more serious the event, the more challenging laughter is to avoid.
Here are a few examples from my own life – unique, unfortunate situations when a giggle-contagion overcame me:
- During class or a lecture. I’ve done that.
- In church during the sermon. Done that.
- Formal dinners. Guilty.
- Serious, high-stress business meetings. Yep, this one too.
- While comforting someone in their sadness and grief. Check.
- When trying to discipline your child for some minor infraction that was, objectively, pretty funny. Been there.
- When someone showed me some art with meaningful symbolism to them and I thought it was a joke. Oops.
Before you judge, consider times when you couldn’t hold in a snicker, no matter how hard you tried. I know you’ve succumbed to circumstantially inappropriate laughter as well (and you should feel compelled to leave your story in the comments).
Maybe you have laughed during some of these occasions:
- During a breakup.
- Marriage counseling.
- While firing someone from their job.
- While getting fired from your own job.
- In the emergency room. (never mind, I’ve now done this one too since I wrote the first draft, as if I willed it into existence… careful what you write).
Some occasions demand personal decorum, which is why these are each inopportune times to launch an infectious giggle, and precisely when it sneaks up on us.
But the worst, the absolute worst time to laugh, and therefore the most difficult place to suppress this strangely inverted reaction, is…
Can you guess?
…
…
…
During a funeral… especially while the pastor or priest is speaking and others are crying.
My cousin Mark and I were unwilling teenage collaborators and co-conspirators in a laugh contagion at our Granny’s funeral.
Laughing at Granny’s Funeral
Mark and I sat on the church pews, second row from the front, left side, the section designated for the nearest-of-kin.
The pews, walnut-stained wood benches covered with bench-long, red-felt seat cushions, were apparently the only seat worthy of small-town Baptist congregations across mid-America in the 1980’s.
The funeral was to honor my great-grandmother, an exceptional and kind human being. Fortunately, Granny had a wonderful sense of humor, so I’m hopeful she forgave the antics at her funeral, should she have been watching from above.
Perhaps just minutes after the pastor began speaking, I felt a low frequency vibration on the church pew, a rumble that somehow matched the natural frequency of walnut and likely registered a sizeable reading on the local Richter scale.
I quickly cut my head to my left, to cousin Mark, limiting my head movement to a 20-degree shift, an act of subtlety appropriate for the occasion. I simultaneously cut my eyes hard in the same direction to complete the glance. Not so coincidentally, Mark performed the equal-but-opposite look back to me, to his right, although his head turned more slowly, because he had not been surprised by the vibration. He had caused it.
We made eye contact.
Mark’s facial expression, part surprise, part terror, instantly verified he was indeed the epicenter of the pew vibration.
Micro facial expressions often communicate more quickly and more succinctly than words.
Mark’s face communicated the idea that perhaps something had been a wee bit more explosive than originally intended and simultaneously questioned if his whimsical ripple had propagated with as much force as it might seem from the data he gathered from his own senses.
Mark looked at me quizzically, as if to verify his internal instrumentation reading, maybe to ascertain the amount of attenuation the red felt cushion on the church pew might have provided.
His facial expression, eyes wider than normal, silently asked, Did you hear that?
Was that you?!, my face replied, eyebrows slightly raised.
Followed quickly by my subtle facial expression change to, Dude…
The synchronicity of our head-turns implied, (no, ensured), we were both silently referring to the same event.
Apparently, Mark thought he could sneak that out like Puff The Magic Dragon. SANL.1
My reciprocal glance informed him, Dude… that wasn’t Puff The Magic Dragon. That was Puff’s angry stepmother breathing fire from Hades that likely warped the stripes on the asphalt in the parking lot.
To be clear, Mark’s expression was notably different from the look people make when they mess their pants. That look is more of shock, eyebrows instantly at maximum elevation, followed by a look of quiet helplessness. I’ve seen that look before, in 9th grade geometry class, when a classmate attempted to demonstrate his ability to pass gas on command. During this effort to impress surrounding classmates, he apparently pushed too hard, with instant regret. That was 5th period. 6th period, the last class for the day, was likely longer for him that day. I won’t name names… Kevin.
Cousin Mark wasn’t Kevin, at least not at Granny’s funeral, but Mark and I were also no strangers to mishaps and shenanigans of this sort.
Backstory
During our middle school years, our parents would drop my brother and me at our grandmother’s lake house for a week of fun with our cousins, Mark and Amy. Looking back, we were probably the perfect age for our parents to leave us somewhere else… for our fun and their sanity.
On one such Summer at Grandma’s house, I had an overwhelmingly clever idea while showering.
My grandma, like other grandmas, had an impressive assortment of shampoos, conditioners, gels, lotions, body wash, and other bottles-of-showery-stuff in the shower stall.
Who knows what they were exactly, or their intended purpose. A 12-year-old boy in the early 80’s only knew two categories of shampoo-like products… the shampoo that wouldn’t burn your eyes, and everything else.
While eyeing these assorted shower chemicals, my middle-school brain landed on what seemed, at the time, like an irrefutable truth: there could be nothing funnier in the world than Mark washing his hair with pee. And, if lucky, my brother Matt too. Sorry cousin Amy. Collateral damage.
But which bottle of shampoo would Mark use? With so many products, the odds of guessing correctly were not in my favor.
Clearly, there was only one obvious, rational solution… pee in all of them, save one, retained as my personal care safe haven for the remainder of the week.
Head & Shoulders would be the walled-garden against washing my hair in pee, an unlikely choice, because that stuff has industrial-strength eye-burning abilities. Nevertheless, it was the only brand I recognized and would therefore remember as my personal, pee-free shampoo option.
Step 1 – Implementation
Allocating a decent measure of pee to five or more different bottles in one go is more difficult than you might at first imagine. It requires prep time to first remove all the caps, then well-metered dosages, and astonishingly good aim.
And there’s another consideration, aim accuracy is improved with shortened distance to the bottle opening. But careful, shampoo doesn’t only burn eyes, a powerful lesson learned from prior life experience. Some caution was warranted.
Having executed Step 1 of my plan, I finished my shower, dried off, dressed, and exited the bathroom.
Step 2 – The Setup
Mark was next in line to shower. Before he went in, I pulled him aside to let him in on my little secret, sort of.
“Hey Mark,” I leaned in and whispered, “I peed in the Head & Shoulders bottle for Matt.”
Mark grinned deviously.
“So, don’t use that one,” I said emphatically.
“Yeah. Ok,” he replied, as he went into the bathroom and closed the door.
Absolutely brilliant. Perfect setup. Trap set.
Mark was now guaranteed to avoid the Head & Shoulders bottle and therefore use one of the other options to wash his hair. I could barely contain the laughter starting to boil up within me (recall, we are discussing inappropriate laughter in this blog post).
As far as I was concerned, Mark was about five minutes from lathering up in Shampee.
Step 3 – Backfire
After showering, Mark exited the bathroom and told me something that turned humor to dread.
He leaned in and whispered to me covertly, “I peed in the Head & Shoulders bottle too.”
“Wait… what! No! Why!?!”
Imagine the surprised look on my face… the same face Mark would show me, years later, sitting on the pew at Granny’s funeral.
Apparently, Mark wanted in on the joke too, so he doubled down on the humor and altered the chemical composition of my safe-haven shampoo.
At this point, I had to fess up, “Dude, I peed in all of them EXCEPT the Head & Shoulders bottle to trick you. Now, thanks to you, all of them are Shampee!”
We were now too deep into this stunt to tell grandma or anyone else, so we just had to finish out the week knowing we were either peeing on our own heads or having greasy hair. I can’t remember which option we chose. One would think this is obvious, but we were middle school boys, so you never know.
That little joke backfired completely and sums up fairly well the kind of relationship Mark and I had growing up.
Back to the Funeral
The glance. The eye contact. Mark’s sheepish grin. It was all too much.
I kept repeating to myself…
Look straight ahead. Don’t laugh. Don’t laugh. Don’t look at him.
Do NOT make eye contact.
Focus. This is a serious, somber occasion, a formal ceremony, I told myself.
“KnuffPpbfbft,” a short snorting sound escaped Mark’s nostrils, the tell-tale sign of the initial struggle with Repressed Laughter Syndrome. I sensed he was on the brink of bursting out, as was I.
No. No. Not now. Focus. Focus. Be serious, I coached myself.
Instinctually, I closed the airways in my throat, placing a blockade across the passage of air trying to exhale through my face. I felt the air pressure in my throat build with each quiver of my stomach. It was trying to escape.
As my head was approaching the upper pressure limit, a safety valve in my throat gave out…
“pbfbfftft…”, followed by a shorter, “pgbt”, through my nose.
Mark heard it, which amplified his prevailing condition. A social contagion was brewing.
At this point, we were both extremely focused on looking forward. I was breaking a sweat. Who knew looking forward and holding one’s composure could be so difficult.
Do NOT look at each other, we thought simultaneously.
I could feel the pew start to bounce sinusoidally, ever so slightly, as Mark’s shoulders began to heave and gyrate like an out-of-balance washing machine at the end of the spin cycle.
This somehow tapped into my natural frequency, making my stomach quiver and my shoulders bounce as well. I grimaced and squinted my eyes trying to contend with the overwhelming physical and psychological pressure to let it out into the world and to share the joy with everyone at the funeral.
My eyes began to water.
Breathe. Be serious. Get yourself together. Look at Granny. It’s an open coffin for goodness’ sake!
“Pthftb,” escaped, a surprise attack.
“Fghtbtf… Bnnbtgf,” Mark replied, shoulders bouncing out-of-control now.
Just when we thought we’d gotten it under control, one of our nostrils would produce a surprise grpthftb! attack when we didn’t actively manage the internal pressure building within our airways.
This condition continued for maybe 15 long, painful, eye-watering minutes as the pastor spoke. Seemed like a year.
Fortunately for us, repressed laughter manifests physically nearly identical to sobbing.
Those poor boys are really emotional about the death of their granny, thought the people behind us.
We tacitly understood this was our cover. Camouflage. We would remain concealed as long as the actual proper laughter did not escape. We just had to survive long enough to avoid the hooting and hollering type of laugh this might erupt into. The battle was hard won, but we eventually escaped with only minor injuries, against formidable opponents – ourselves.
I’m sure you’ve been there too. The contagion of inappropriate laughter is unrelenting, completely overwhelming, and simultaneously socially unacceptable, yet, brilliantly wonderful when it happens… to someone else.
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FOOTNOTES:
Oh, how I’m wishing it were not Sunday because I’ll be going to church in a little while and I DO NOT NEED THIS TO BE ON MY MIND. ‘Nuff said.
This made me laugh out loud. How appropriate. And yes I can check many of those boxes above as well – church, class, wedding, formal dinner, formal ceremony, disciplining a child, hospital…
But my favorite is when I was Jill‘s Lamaze coach and we were almost kicked out of class because we couldn’t stop laughing. I don’t even remember what started it, but unlike your funeral example, we were unable to contain the laughter. I’m pretty sure I made some remark about the nurse/teacher being a character straight out of an SNL skit. UPTIGHT! And then her efforts to shush us just made it worse. We completely lost it.
Thanks for the smile!