Funny phrases have a big giggle factor

Sometimes, a sure laugh is just a memory away.
By LESLIE GARCIA
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Words and phrases sometimes slip through our psyches like sand through our fingers. But some stick around, like sand to our ocean-dipped fingers.
Why, I wonder, do I remember what the nurse at work said when I asked whether I'd have a reaction to the flu shot she'd just given me?
"You may feel a bit of general malaise," she told my friend Nancy and me, "or some tenderness at the site of inoculation."
We were highly entertained by this, and repeated it for years to come. I haven't seen Nancy in eons. But I have no doubt if I ran into her and asked how she was, she'd say, "Oh, OK, though I seem to have a bit of general malaise."
Dr. Alan Brown, a psychology professor at Southern Methodist University, has a neat answer to why we remember certain phrases. (Of course, this is the Leslie-take; I'm sure he'd explain it differently to colleagues.)
Why we remember
Basically, it's this: The brain structure that's part of our emotional system is next to the brain section that works with memory. So we're more likely to remember something if there are strong emotions attached.
Which probably explains why, 51 years after that otherwise innocuous summer afternoon, a woman named Kristi Hager still remembers six words that made her and her mother fall on the floor with laughter.
I heard her while listening to National Public Radio one Friday morning. I was running, headphones on, and Kristi was the subject of a wonderful series called Story Corps. She was remembering her mother, Nadine Hager, who had recently died at age 87.
Kristi wanted to share. Not one of her mother's secret recipes, not tips for ironing blouses -- but how the two of them had laughed together.
She remembered being 9, the year her family had put in a "swimming pond." Her mother was taking lifesaving classes, and Kristi helped her study for the exam.
"What would you do," Kristi read from the handbook, "if underwater weeds start pulling you down while you're swimming?"
The answer: "Extricate yourself with slow, undulating motions."
For whatever reason, that combination of words struck them both as hilarious.
Losing yourself
Their laughter escalated into the uncontrollable kind, as it does when the stars of hilarity -- person, setting, mood -- align just right. Maybe it led to a snort-laugh or two -- the true sign you've lost yourself in laughter. And as happens when we're particularly lucky, it seemed as if it would never stop.
I turned off my headphones after hearing the story, repeating the phrase all the way home so I wouldn't forget. I was so taken that a few days later, I tracked Kristi down to tell her.
"These words are so odd and funny that I never forgot them," says Kristi, now 60 and an artist in Missoula, Mont.
Some days, laughing with my son seems replaced by Mom-nags.
But when I told him the story about Kristi and her mother, he laughed with me.