Has there been an occasion (or occasions) when you started laughing inappropriately at an event or in front of a group?

Part of the reason I avoid funerals like the plague is that I had giggling fits at more than one when I was young.
The juxtaposition of a dead body laying exposed in the front of the room and people gossiping about the granddaughter’s bi-racial pregnancy in the corner is just too much hypocrisy to bear.

Once when I was about 18, my stepfather’s uncle died. I’d never met the uncle, but went to the wake with my mom and stepfather. When I saw the uncle laying in the casket, he looked to me just like Ronald Reagan. I started laughing, had to hide my head. My mom said “what are you laughing at?” She said it very quietly, as I made it look like I was crying on her shoulder. I told her “He looks just like Ronald Reagan.” She said “Go outside” and I did. I pulled myself together.

My sister died when she was just 49. At her memorial service (held at her house), her husband got this weird guy to officiate. When I was introduced to him I thought “Oh no, it’s the Reverend Jim from Taxi. This guy did way too many drugs in his past.”

I was standing with my family facing most of the crowd which included her former co-workers. He intoned a greeting to the mourners solemnly and then said. “We’re going to start off with a song, pulling out a guitar.” I don’t know what I was expecting, but it definitely wasn’t “Happy Trails to You”. It was so utterly ridiculous and all I could think of was my sister looking down at the proceedings and rolling with laughter. I was overcome with a fit of hysterical laughter, which I buried in a bunch of Kleenex that I held to my face. I finally had to leave the room so I could let it all out. My youngest sister later told me she thought I was sobbing so I guess I covered it up OK.

Ha..this happened at church just last Sunday…
The preacher was talking about swinging singles
and that they would meet up at a hotel and everyone
would drop their keys in a bowl and then you would
pick a key and that was your “date”. He said wonder
how many picked their own partners key….and I let
out a big laugh in church and the pastor said “sounds
like you know something about this!” It just struck me
as funny and that would be my luck it I did swing!
The whole congregation laughed when the preached
called my name and said that. My face was bright red!

Not in any serious, formal setting no, but… I have a drama queen house mate and often laugh either out loud or to myself when she is having one of her snits. I have never known anyone that can get so pissy over the littlest things at times. Recently she misplaced something and was just going on and on searching around the house with this dramatic running commentary for about 10 minutes. Man…sometimes I don;t know whether to laugh or hit her over the head with a shovel. lol

@jca ”.....as I made it look like I was crying on her shoulder [I said] “He looks just like Ronald Reagan.” She said “Go outside”. ..” BAHAHAHHAAAAHAHAHA!!! She told you to go outside because if she looked at you again in the next several seconds she’d collapse in hilarity herself! That is toooo funny!

I’ve never had the urge to laugh during a very serious time…which is kind of why I avoid serious times. But I’d like to share a story with y’all about my dad, when he was young:

Dad’s mom died when he was just 13, so it was just him and his dad, in a tiny, tiny 2 bedroom house.
One night he had a friend over and he and this friend got the giggles during the night. Grammpa yelled from the next room, “Quiet down boys!”
They tried not to laugh but, as we all know, trying not to laugh makes it immeasurably harder.
So they’re trying to stifle their giggles when suddenly Grampa let a super LOUD one rip, and at the same instant a slat fell out from under his mattress and hit the floor with a loud ”BANG!!!”
That’s all she wrote! Dad and his friend just lost it and laughed uncontrollably and loudly for 20 more minutes. Grammpa never said another word.

Every time I fire a butler, it’s the pathetic look of forlorn hope that kills me

I laugh at stupid things and have virtually no control over my laughter.

At my great-grandmother’s funeral Mass, her great-grandchildren were to sprinkle holy water on the casket using an aspergillum. The casket was displayed in front of the altar, so we all got up from our pew seats and stood in a line along the casket. We sent the aspergillum down the line, each of us sprinkling some water on the casket. When it got to my turn to sprinkle the water, I accidentally knocked the aspergillum on the casket. Very loudly. The thumping sound echoed all along the walls of the vaulted cathedral. Me and my other cousins couldn’t stop laughing. My parents were so pissed at me, and probably so were the other adults.

Years ago I worked in an Oracle® shop as Oracle Applications™ internal support for a small (but still “global”) manufacturer in California as one of the junior HelpDesk folks. While Oracle itself is a pretty stable and reliable database, we were having a lot of trouble with the Applications™ (business applications) and customizations that had been added for the benefit of this manufacturer and its systems. It would crash from time to time for reasons that were not always very well understood, and usually unpredictable. For that reason and others we had a service agreement with the other divisions of the manufacturer that we (as support staff) would provide round-the-clock support. When it crashed, then we would be on call to restart the system within moments, but it was still a huge inconvenience to whoever was working with the program.

Still, that wasn’t enough to satisfy some of the Management team.

Late one quarter the VP of Finance came down to our area to discuss Oracle’s reliability during the close of the current quarter – which was also the close to the fiscal year. They had a serious heart-to-heart – in the open office and in front of us peons – and the VP of Finance said, seriously and deadpan, that he wanted “to assure that there won’t be any unscheduled outages of Oracle” while the quarter closing was in progress. In other words: Don’t let Oracle crash while we’re closing this quarter’s books.

I burst out laughing. How could I not think this was a joke? My own VP looked at me as if to say, “I know. I KNOW! It’s a ridiculous request: Make sure there are no accidents. But go along with it.” The VP of Finance… well, you can’t explain how silly that request is to someone stupid enough to make it, so we just let him go on thinking that I was inappropriately insane.

When I heard, “I’ve never heard of Auschwitz or the Holocaust,” from a 40 year old woman, born, raised and educated in America, I almost burst out laughing. Then I realized she was serious and I almost burst out crying.

Oh, geez. I laugh at inappropriate moments all the time. A notable one was my grandmother’s funeral. I laugh when I’m nervous or uncomfortable. Whatever.

Funeral. That happens to everyone eventually, right?

Oh gosh, too many times to count. If something is funny, I laugh. There is no controlling it regardless.