LMAO Victims Speak Out, Raise Awareness

Hartford, CONN--“It's a case of 'you don't know what you've got till it's gone,' you know?” says Sam Chenoweth, as he continues to stand in his den while I comfortably sit on the abandoned sofa in the corner. Sam often stands while others sit, these days. “You know,” he continues, “when I look back at it, I think, ‘Why couldn’t I have just L’d my F O?’ You know?” I asked him what the ‘F’ stands for, and with minor confusion he said ‘flab’.

Chenoweth is one of many who have LMAO’d--where a person laughs so hard their posterior falls off, a phenomenon that emerged over a decade ago.

The first known LMAO case is Kristine Hasboro of Spokane, WA. Back in 2004, Hasboro was IM-ing a friend. They were sending each other URL links of things they'd found online, until a particular link was sent to Hasboro that would change the internet landscape, forever: an animation involving dancing badgers. “It's something that I still regret,” says Hasboro’s close friend, who asked to be kept anonymous. They claim they are responsible for what happened. “Those were the days of [Microsoft Window’s] Instant Messenger. We didn’t know what forces we were tampering with, because we didn’t exactly know what we had, yet.” Hasboro’s friend recalls sending the animation was an innocent attempt to ‘keep the convo going.’ Once she clicked the link, Hasboro laughed so hard she immediately stood up. She suddenly no longer had anything to sit on, and quickly typed ‘M R GN C, LMAO BRB.’ 

Hasboro’s friend states, “I asked what happened, but didn't get any response. When her status went to idle, I didn’t know what to do. I panicked. I didn’t know what ‘LMAO’ meant, so I opened a couple of forums and mentioned it in a few chatrooms. When I heard from Kristy that she couldn’t sit down ‘cause she laughed so hard her, well, ‘butt’ came off, I was able to put it together before she was released from the hospital.” When this was explained on each forum, the acronym went viral, internationally.

Visual Approximation

The pandemic of laughter-removed gluteals reached Sam Chenoweth one morning in the winter of 2015. He was at work when a co-worker shared a cat gif in an office email. The cat in the gif, as he describes it, “was laying on a floor, and suddenly he stands up with his paws out, but still looking at the guy, and he walks away on his hind legs, like an evil cat, but funny, you know? And then, well, I just lost it. What can you do, you know?” That gif is what caused him to LMAO.

He invited me to lunch, and we walked the few miles between his apartment and the deli, since he can no longer drive. Naturally, he stood as he ate. “Beats starving,” he tells me, while his back is turned to an older couple who can’t stop staring at the negative space above his legs. As we continue to talk, he begins to lay out a laundry-list of more life adjustments, including his trouble with pants (“Nothin’ to hold the back up,”) his dating life (“I didn’t know women were so into that, you know?”) and his daily struggle with toilets (“What is it coming out of? I stand in bed at night thinking about it.”)

As we headed out the door, he told me he never knew he was so careless and insensitive with how he spoke before his current predicament. His psychic wounds are still fresh, and phrases like ‘butt-hurt’ or ‘there are no buts about it’ are difficult to hear, even painful. “It just cuts me to my core to be reminded of what I've lost, you know? And these are things I said all the time, before.” He choked up, with tears sitting in his eyes. “I just wish I could take it all back, you know?”

As we’re walking into his apartment, I mention that at least his walk seems fine. “Well, I don’t know much about the body,” he replies, “I just know you don’t have to take up much space in the back to go forward.” He motioned three curled fingers to scratch a space under his hips which he called his ‘phantom itch,’ and continued, “I can’t help wonder if that applies to all of us in this economy.”

Chenoweth, along with others who have lost their A’s to laughter, realizes he took his A for granted before L’ing it O. Now, he and others who have L’d O their A’s are raising awareness. They’ve created a crowd-funded support group called: The American Social Society for Lost Extremities, not in the Strictest Sense, but still Challenged and Hopeless because of their Absent Posterior Situation. All proceeds go to the campaign to raise awareness of those whose lives have been affected from LMAO-ing. They have a weekly group gathering welcome to LMAO victims and their loved ones. They also hold seminars to lessen the risk of LMAO-ing in the workplace. Their tagline: “LOL or ROFL, the other one’s awful.”

If this can happen to Sam Chenoweth, Kristine Hasboro, and countless others, it’s clear that it can happen in our own homes and workplaces. Chenoweth says there’s no reason to give up on the internet, though, and there's certainly no reason to be afraid to laugh, but to be cautious. “You don’t want to lose body parts because you’re laughing, right?” he says, “But, hey. At least I don’t have another A to L O.”