While hanging out at my friend’s place, my buddy’s roommate (who is a hop, skip and a jump away from graduation) brought up this idea: When life gets you down in DeKalb, just imagine squirrel hunting as a sport.

No, no—it’s not a conventional means of hunting any normal human being would expect. By “squirrel hunting,” he meant getting so close to a DeKalb-habituated squirrel that you can kick it.

And then you kick it.

I laughed for a while after that. It didn’t matter if we weren’t on that topic anymore—even outside the context of that conversation, the image of a squirrel being punted just sent me into a fit of hysterics all over again.

Then I got to thinking, I generally just find things being kicked hilarious.

Allow me to elaborate:

I was watching the first episode of South Park with another friend of mine, Tom, and I was chuckling through the entire episode. You just can’t go wrong with South Park. But this was the part where I just lost my cool:

I don’t know. I just couldn’t stop laughing for a solid minute. It didn’t matter that the Visitors eventually put a probe in Cartman’s butt—this baby kick was the winning part for me. Tom looked concerned at my hysterics, but then just let it happen.

The fact that Trey Parker and Matt Stone kept bringing that joke back with Kyle and his brother Ike just makes me happy.

Another time, I watched the first Jackass movie with Tom. Granted, Johnny Knoxville is a pretty cool dude on his own (especially in The Ringer), but the humor in Jackass just wasn’t doing it for me. It wasn’t like I was offended, it just isn’t my humor preference.

Then we came to this point:

I actually laughed for a solid minute, demanded that my friend rewind to that part and watch it again, and proceeded to laugh for another solid minute, snorting and all, in the middle of his parents’ very nice house.

It was much like how my brother made me rewind to this part of Napoleon Dynamite multiple times back when the movie was so popular:

Even posting it now, I can’t stop laughing. For that alone, you can tell we’re related.

And to return to our first point of laughing at the expense of animals, here’s a subject all of you might enjoy: Fainting goats.

For those who have never seen a video of a fainting goat, I guarantee you, it’ll make you feel less awful about the sub-par day you may be having:

I mean, come on. So you might have been evicted. Maybe you failed an exam. Or maybe your significant other just broke up with you. At least your legs don’t stiffen and make you fall over when someone scares the crap out of you. And now I’ve given you the gift of laughing at the poor goats’ misfortune.

They’re all cheap laughs, I know. But the idea of kicking anything living is simply amusing to me.

Editor’s Note: The Northern Star does not support animal abuse and does not encourage kicking squirrels.