You may not come off best in the end, so don’t laugh too soon. The following little incident is borrowed from Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. The narrator has just had an early morning dip in the Thames.
I was very cold when I got back into the boat, and, in my hurry to get my shirt on, I accidentally jerked it into the water. It made me awfully wild, especially as George burst out laughing. I could not see anything to laugh at, and I told George so, and he only laughed the more. I never saw a man laugh so much. I quite lost my temper with him at last, and I pointed out to him what a drivelling maniac of an imbecile idiot he was; but he only roared the louder. And then, just as I was landing the shirt, I noticed that it was not my shirt at all, but George’s, which I had mistaken for mine; whereupon the humour of the thing struck me for the first time, and I began to laugh. And the more I looked from George’s wet shirt to George, roaring with laughter, the more I was amused, and I laughed so much that I had to let the shirt fall back into the water again.
‘Aren’t you – you – going to get it out?’ said George between his shrieks.
I could not answer him for a while, I was laughing so, but at last, between my peals I managed to jerk out: ‘It isn’t my shirt – it’s your!’ I never saw a man’s face change from lively to severe so suddenly in all my life before. I tried to make him see the fun of the thing, but he could not. George is very dense at seeing a joke sometimes.
He laughs best who laughs last