Monday, May 21, 2007

Random things that have made me snort stuff out my nose

I have a hair-trigger sense of humour. I will laugh, a lot, at almost anything (fortunately, including myself). I have an raucous, uninhibited guffaw that sends my husband cringing from the room.

Humour is, of course, a subjective thing. Something I find funny, you may well not. Indeed, something I found so funny I just about puked with laughter one day, by the very next day I could be wondering what I was going on about.

Here are some not-that-funny things that have, in particular contexts, sent me into hysterics:

Aztecs (the car)
Bobble-head dolls
The word "Shoe". Also the word "Myanmar".
Once when typing really fast, I garbled the word "himself" so badly that Spellcheck asked anxiously: Did you mean "housefly"? Had I agreed to this correction, the sentence I was typing would have read, "He went to the store by housefly."

The great humourist Dave Barry once wrote a column about his unparalleled delight when he discovered the existence of a UNESCO heritage site in Alberta called Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. He claims that when he telephoned the place and the call was answered, "Head-Smashed-In, how can I help you?" he went into absolute paroxysms of joy. I totally understand this. This is one of the funniest things I have ever heard.

Getting the uncontrollable giggles is common to young girls. It's not still supposed to be a problem in menopausal women. I went to a choral concert a couple of years ago with a friend. The choir was a professional one, dressed formally in tuxes or long black skirts (whichever they preferred, one assumes). They were all thoroughly white of skin. The programme was primarily classical, but ended with a few rousing spirituals. I do not remember the name of the first one they treated us to, but I certainly do recall that it involved a lot of repetition of the word "heaven", especially in the many refrains. Except that they pronounced it the way I suppose it was written, which was "heab'n".

I cannot begin to tell you how odd and inappropriate this sounds coming from a stiff, Caucasian, Canadian classical choir. I totally lost it. I scribbled on my program "These people have NO BUSINESS saying heab'n!" and passed it to my female companion, who immediately also become hysterical. The song seemed to go on forever. Heab'n, heab'n, heab'n. The two of us were shaking and trembling and weeping. The people behind us must have thought we were spiritually moved to transports by this music. I was certainly spiritually moved to pray very, very hard that none of the subsequent spirituals would contain the word heab'n.

The most painful thing I have ever snorted out my nose when laughing was French onion chip dip. That really burned.

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