Dear TEd; one of the loudest laughs I ever heard was on a radio show in early thirties, with Fred Allen and Jack Benny. Fred Allen wrote most all of his own lines, and was very good at ad-libs. He was getting the better of Jack Benny for most of the show, until finally Jack Benny said: "You wouldn't talk to me like that if my writers were here!" It really brought down the house, and continued long enough to bother the people running the program, so that they turned off the microphones in the crowd, and the announcer interrupted with some sort of message.