How the Other Half Laughs

Well I meant to post this years ago...my favorite funny vignette. Jess if you're out there...thanks!

Do Men Giggle???

Being women, we notice the little nuances about life that, often, men will overlook. It's not that they don't care, they just don't think the way we do. You know, Mars and Venus and all that. Quite often it's these petites choses quotidiennes that lend themselves to why women laugh so darn much.

Take for example you and your best girl friend at age 13. I know that I remember Heather or Kristen and myself driving my poor father bananas with the sound of girlie giggling until every ungodly hour of the morning during all-too-frequent sleepovers. Worse yet, more often than not, if you asked us, we probably had little to no idea what was so blessed funny. Often things that normally would not be so funny on their own would appear, for that moment, the funniest damn thing you'd heard or seen in a century.

It came to my attention late one night, not so long ago that I had never actually heard a man giggle the way that I so often did and do with my girlfriends. I even went so far as to pose the question to some of my own girl friends to see if they, too, had come to the same questionable conclusion. Does the male species actually giggle? Not laugh, not chuckle...giggle.

Phone Parts, Farts and Marshmallow Hearts

I can think to put it no other way; we cavorted! Through the driving snow, Jessie and I laughed until it hurt. The whole weekend was an utter and complete loss. We’d driven 5 hours with the band (presumably to work all weekend helping with album pre-production…) but upon arriving we were, instead, perceived as “band aids… or groupies.” Heinous. The lady of the house hated us; the guys were in recording session more than 12 hours a day. The best we could do was run errands; which we did.

Between preparing and serving meals, retrieving items left behind at pre-production, grocery shopping, obtaining copious amounts of pink bismuth for the drummer who had elected to dine on cold pizza for breakfast and buying flowers, we laughed. We laughed at things that were mildly to uproariously funny but despite their level of laughability we giggled like 15 year olds until we were doubled over.

First on our list of goofy guffaw-worthy scenarios were men in the morning. More specifically, why it is that men expel gas at an alarming rate upon waking up out of any which orifice is most readily available. Per our query, the drummer, Scott, offers that he must swallow a lot of air while sleeping open-mouthed, then promptly farts and gives us girls a satiated cheese whiz grin.

Next on our list of inter-gender inquiries was food. Men will eat anything...anytime. Our trip to Maryland with the guys was over Valentine's Day weekend and so Jessie and I decided to get each boy a rose. We quickly amended our choice, however, to marshmallow peeps in the shape of hearts when we saw the price tag on the flowers. Yikes! We reasoned that the guys like junk food so they'd appreciate this. It was red, sticky sweet and smelled like the strongest strawberry flavored bubble gum we'd ever encountered.

On our drive back to the studio, Jess and I decided we'd give these sugar bombs a try. The red sugar melts on your pallet as the sweet scent of strawberry assails every sense. Your mouth puckers at how sweet it tastes but you chew and chew and chew knowing full well that this IS your dentist’s worst nightmare. The marshmallow disintegrates in your mouth and the candy dissolves. After one and a half of these crazy treats your body goes immediately into the preliminary stages of diabetic shock at which point we decide anything this sweet is better off left as chewing gum.

With that in mind, I turn to Jessie saying, "Whoa." She agrees and says. "Yeah kind of intense, like bubblegum on steroids." I smile at her assessment and with a loud burst of laughter respond, "ABSOLUTELY...Strawberry cream hearts,....good for chewing, not for eating." Well that was the end of us. The ride to Mechanicsville from Waldorf takes 20 minutes. We laughed the whole way.

About a year earlier, I experienced the same phenomenon with two other girlfriends. At this point we all of us were over the age of 22 and decided we needed to have a girls night in, or, in plain English, a sleepover! I had just bought a new cell phone, which I was fiddling with all evening in a vain attempt to master all the little technological nuances thereof.

Along with my phone came a little plastic pack complete with the hip clip and a little rubber stopper with directions as to how to use each with my phone. According to these, the plastic plug in the back of the phone had to be removed so the hip clip could be used. That seemed straight forward enough. However you can imagine the kind of raucous laughter that was generated by the instructions concerning how to employ the little rubber stopper while the hands free jack is not in use.

Now I KNOW someone did not proofread these directions or they would have known that, in modern colloquial American English, an instruction to "Jam plug in jack hole" would set a LOT of people laughing. Truth be told, I'm having a good laugh about it now. I collapsed out of my chair onto the floor, with my two girlfriends demanding to know what in the name of heaven was so funny. When I handed them my "directions" it took two hours for the laughter to cease and more than two weeks before statements like "Pssst....Hanna! You're jack hole is showing!" to finally slow to a halt.

A Hung Jury

With these stories retold, I truly want to know, do men laugh themselves silly the way we women do? I really hope so. Last week while falling asleep with my friend Jessie and laughing so loud about David Bowie's "obnoxious package" in Labyrinth, that we had to lay face down in our pillows, I asked her again, "Do you think Tucker and the boys actually giggle like this?"

She gave it a good minute's thought and came to the conclusion that, whereas she'd seen her boyfriend give a good belly laugh or two, she hadn't known any guy to really giggle for a prolonged period of time. "Not like we did just now" she said.

That's too bad, I thought. I mean, although I don't relish the stomach cramps and reprimands from tired parents in rooms only across the hall, the incredible freedom in that moment when you laugh so hard you cannot see straight is a feeling no one should ever miss.

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