Laughtermanship

I just watched a clip from the old Carol Burnett Show sent to me by my sister. It’s the one with Tim Conway as the dentist and I’m still wiping tears from my cheeks. Harvey Korman couldn’t stop laughing, either, and he was in it.
Here’s the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9T8i4FkNVo

This is the light side of the Internet. SOS personified. Someone had to find the clip, save it and start sending it on so I could start my day with a guffaw and a tissue.
Thank goodness I'm old enough to call those the good old days of television and not care what it sounds like to the kids. IMHO they should be envious of having creative, clever, insanely funny (and untargeted, unpolitical and unscrofulous) entertainment to laugh at. Different times, yes.
Better? Blinder? Binding? I feel lucky to have had both. What do you think?
I’m just supremely pleased to start my day on a high positive charge.
Which got me thinking about kinds of laughter. Audiences are influenced by the loudest member. Actors in a comedy approach the first joke never knowing if there will be a laugh (and prepared for them in unexpected places). If there is even a titter, you’re home free. It gives permission for others to make noise. If you can hear a pin drop, you’ve got your work cut out to get them to start laughing.
But I know people who can hear a joke, keep a deadpan face and say they loved it. Others laugh so hard they bend over double and cry .
Who’s to say one gets a bigger kick than the other? (Actors, who universally agree a laughing audience generates more laughter).
Some days no emails are funny. Other days I get caught unawares and burst out in a belly laugh. Or in tears, as with the terminally crazy Conway.
Lately I’ve taken to showing I am a friendly, harmless, good natured person by adding a Hee Hee to statements that might be taken as too direct. As in, “I was just running out the door, I promise to read/mail/send it, OK? Hee hee” when someone is eating up my phone minutes. They respond well to it.
There are all kinds of laughtermanship (OK, laughterfolkship).
And that’s a good thing.
Thanks, Sis!
SLI