Uncontrollable Laughter #1

     Today, in organic chemistry, I felt uncontrollable laughter for the first time in a long time.  Dr. Montchamp, our professor, was attempting to show us why this specific carbene would not react with a base.  The reason behind this was that the carbene's molecular orbitals were sterically hindered.  Dr. Montchamp attempted to draw these orbitals, but upon its completion, it seemed as if he had drawn male genitalia on the bored.  Nobody wanted to be the first person to laugh.  Unfortunately, Brad, my friend who sits next to me, could not control his immaturity and began to giggle.  It had been long enough before he started laughing that the rest of the class had already moved on and gotten over the drawing silently.  So of course, Brad was the lone giggler- however, this was not the case for long.  This was due to Brad laughing SO HARD that his glasses came unscrewed and the lens fell out.  I could no longer hold back my laughter.  So as Brad and I are laughing so hard that we can't breathe, my friend who sits on the other side of me, Elli, attempted to take a picture of the board because the next reaction was too difficult to draw.  However, Elli forgot to turn the flash of her camera off.  Dr. Montchamp looked up, and at this point, all three of us were dying from everything happening in such a short amount of time.  Dr. Montchamp just shook his head and after a few minutes, all was calm.

     Obviously in this case, the uncontrollable laughter was a distracting agent.  Brad first distracted me and our laughter distracted Elli.  By the point that all three of us were laughing, we were also distracting everyone within a three row radius of us.  Distraction is often looked at as a con of laughter, but I don't think it was necessarily a bad thing here.  On top of it being an extremely stressful environment, I had a terrible morning and this helped turned that around.  While we were distracting, the only thing going on at the time was copying drawings off of the board, so I do not think we hindered anyone's learning; in fact, I would like to think that we made someone's day better with our laughter.