I guess you had to be there (in my head)

I love the ache you get in your stomach after you’ve had a big belly laugh. Never experienced it? Then you’ve never laughed hard enough.

Ian says the darnedest things and even though he doesn’t actually try to be funny, at least once or twice a week he’ll still have me collapsed in a heap, laughing till my cheeks ache, my eyes are watering and I almost can’t breathe. Call me crazy but I’m addicted to that feeling!

There’s been a number of times where I’ve started laughing about something at a kind of inappropriate time and haven’t been able to get myself under control. Usually it’s with Leigh or my cousin Roz. They’re those ‘you had to be there’ moments.

Sometimes being there isn’t even enough. Once at work, I was in a really tense meeting and someone said to someone else in a really bitchy, highly sarcastic tone, ‘So if I flew in from Mars, you’d just expect me to understand this?’ Which wasn’t a funny comment at all. But into my head popped a vision of Mr Squiggle coming down from the moon and I totally lost it. And I mean lost it. I just could not stop laughing. Everyone was looking at me as though I was completely mad (which I possibly am). I ended up having to excuse myself and leave the room. I couldn’t even say ‘I guess you had to be there’…because they were there…in the room…just not in my head where it was a much more amusing place.

I am also totally incapable of watching or hearing other people laugh without joining in. Sometimes I’ll hear someone in the office giggling about something and I feel my shoulders start to shake even though I don’t actually know what it is they are laughing about.

Once I’ve got the giggles it really is almost impossible for me to pull myself together. Which is why I love this clip I found today.

Apparently this woman is Hungarian and she is trying to tell a story about some guy named Csobi who fell off a stool. I can’t understand a word she is saying but I can totally relate to the way she just can’t stop laughing!

“I love to laugh
Loud and long and clear
I love to laugh
It’s getting worse ev’ry year
The more I laugh
The more I fill with glee
And the more the glee
The more I’m a merrier me
It’s embarrassing!
The more I’m a merrier me!”

Uncle Albert, from Mary Poppins