BREAK UP!
It has different names among those broadcasters or actors who have experienced such a condition. It is not uncommon incident and performers all dread the moment when it might come to them.
I am speaking of that strange condition in which a normally calm and stable individual finds himself or herself overcome with with a mad tendency to giggle and to break out in nervous spasms of laughter totally beyond one's control It has happened to the very best of the performers. For a time everything is funny and one has no ability to control it. It interrupts and punctuates anything one can say or do.
I have heard it on network radio;, witnessed it on TV nationally and locally just as you have. I remember one TV news program years ago, when a fifteen minute newscast went haywire suddenly, seemingly haywire without reason. The final eight minutes of the program were dismal. One had the giggles, another was on the edge, it appeared, and a third, the weather man, was obviously embarrassed by the sudden lapse in sanity. It was he who wisely took over and closed the time slot with more weather from his somewhat withdraw weather board area aside from the main area of frivolity.
When I got to the copy office the next morning, there had all ready been a “front office” pow-wow. The verdict by management was, wisely, one of total absolution. The station manager had been through the same experience himself in his years in the control room. It was to go unpunished.
I found out later there was a key to it all in the fact that a floor manager, moving about the studio, had tripped over a pile of coiled wire and fallen flat on the floor in front of the news desk. He decided to lie still where he had fallen rather that create additional noise, and the silly grin on his fallen face tickled the news reader deep down behind his common sense bone.
I have been on the brink of the precipice myself. I was reading fifteen minutes of commodity and farm market reports when it suddenly hit me that every time the word “turkey” occurred it was spelled on the yellow teletype paper in front of me as “Gurkey” and “Gurkies”. I had genuine trouble not saying as I was seeing. The more I tried to ignore the change, the more it became a matter of interest. I know I sounded happier than unusual, but the area was the leading turkey raising section of the nation and the news about turkey markets that days was good.
I have often thought of those strange moment of being on the every edge of collapse. You never know what strange little thing might tickle your funny bone. Having been there, I view such a plight with special concern.
A.L.M. February 4, 2004 [c486wds]
