This shattered the previous record set by 50 million American television viewers who watched Bill Clinton's "I did not have sex with that woman" speech. A photo of a chubby Monica Lewinski delivering pizza to the Oval Office got bigger, but not longer, laughs.

"Wongsomboom" in Thai describes the sound of two fruit bats involved in rough foreplay, but this is not what made her laugh. (It did however, crack up my brother-in-law.)

For the longest non-stop laugh in the history of the world -- although no one was there to hear Noah's reaction when he saw the pigmy pony had enlisted the help of the musk ox in an attempt to mate with the female giraffe -- Jittarat Wongsomboom won 1,500 British pounds.

Now that's not as much money as Lord Black of Crossharbour Conrad Black absconded with while telling rude jokes about people without titles, but it's still a good return on 12 1/2 minutes of mirth.

It's not easy to laugh for almost a quarter of an hour. The only way I could do it is if David Letterman strung together eight years' worth of his Great Moments In Presidential History, the very popular segment in which President George W. Bush gets the crap beat out of him by three-syllable words. (You have to request a re-run of the one in which the president claims "the southwest of America has suffered through a 10-year drought" and he pronounces it "drofficit.") If they'd shown clips of President Bush repeatedly falling off his bicycle, they would have had to put Depends on Jittarat Wongsomboom.

No, it's not easy laughing for an extended period of time and apparently even Jittarat Wongsomboom (admit it, you just love saying that name!) started to wane around the 10-minute mark.

Furiously, her supporters scrambled to find things to make her laugh. Just at the moment Jittarat was about to break down, they put up a chart outlining Stephane Dion's carbon tax plan and for 30 straight seconds they had to hold her up to keep her from falling down laughing. When they told her he went to Alberta and tried to sell his plan in person, she did collapse, but was back on her feet by the count of eight.

And that's the way it went for those last crucial, record-setting minutes of laughter. Jittarat slowed to a low guffaw and quickly her supporters threw up a list of the 10 most beautiful women in the world, any one of which New York Yankee millionaire Alex Rodriguez could have in a heartbeat. And Jittarat did not find that particularly funny until they showed her a photo of Madonna and told her that was the woman he gave up his marriage for. At this point the woman went off like a rocket and her supporters said later, if she wasn't going for the record, they would have had to sedate her.

The laughter died down, as it always does, and Jittarat's people held up a photograph of Matts Sundin, naked on the throne striking "The Thinker" pose. She was mildly amused until they informed her that he had been sitting there for three months trying to decide if he'll permit an NHL team to pay him $20 million to push a rubber thingy around a patch of ice. That's when spectators thought they heard her "snorgle."

They told her that if there's a worldwide depression it could be traced back to two people named Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and she thought it was a pretty good joke.

Then they showed her a video of the world's hottest ventriloquist team -- Russian President Dmitri Medvedev sitting on Vladamir Putin's lap. She loved the bit where Putin, while drinking a glass of water, is heard to say: "It's Georgia not Jordan, you Smirnoff!"

They showed her the rising price of gas, the rising price of food and cheese rotting in Denmark and she made the comedic connection.

How they got hold if it, I'll never know, but they showed Jittarat my passport photo, the one taken a month ago after I was told I was not allowed to smile. (It's official, they want you to look like a criminal because if you do break the law, they've already got your mug shot.) She laughed, but not as loud as when they showed her a photo of my dog Jake watching me do my Colorectal Cancer Home Kit Test. She howled louder than he did.

Then, it was down to the final few seconds and her handlers were out of props. In desperation one of them threw up a photograph of Andrew Lloyd Webber and -- "crikey" -- it pushed her over the edge. Laughing only seems like fun, today it's a serious career choice.

William Thomas can be reached through his website, www.williamthomas.ca.