So, I was sitting across from this young podcast host a few weeks ago. He was one of those guys who grew up watching the reruns with his dad, and he had this look of pure reverence in his eyes.

He leaned into the microphone and asked me, “Mike, we all know Harry Morgan was the consummate professional. He was the rock of that set. Did he ever just… lose it? Did you guys ever actually get to him?”

I couldn’t help but grin. My mind went back forty-some years to the scrubbed-out hills of Malibu, where the heat was usually hovering around a hundred degrees and the dust was so thick you could chew it.

You have to understand, Harry was a guy who came from the old school of Hollywood. He had worked with everyone. He knew his lines, he knew his blocking, and he never, ever messed up a take. He was the Colonel, both on and off the screen.

But beneath that stern, Midwestern exterior, Harry had this wicked, wonderful sense of humor. The problem was, if you actually managed to make him laugh, it was like breaking a dam. Once he started, he couldn’t stop.

We used to spend hours in the “Swamp”—the tent where Alan, Gary, and I lived on camera—just plotting ways to crack that professional veneer. We were like bored kids in a boarding school, and Harry was the headmaster we desperately wanted to see giggle.

One afternoon, toward the end of a particularly long, grueling shoot, we decided to escalate things. We had found this old, discarded medical mannequin in the prop storage behind the mess tent.

It was a gruesome-looking thing, honestly. It was missing a limb and had this vacant, haunting stare that only a 1970s-era medical prop could possess. We knew exactly where it needed to go.

We waited until Harry was called away for a lighting setup on the helipad. It was a rare moment where his private trailer was left unlocked and unguarded.

Alan Alda and I grabbed the mannequin, which we had affectionately named “The Colonel’s Cousin,” and we started dressing it. We found an extra set of Harry’s fatigues, his signature hat, and even a pair of his spare glasses.

We tucked it into his bed, pulling the covers right up to its chin so only the top of its head and those thick glasses were visible in the dim light of the trailer.

We even placed one of his favorite books in its plastic hands. It looked just enough like a sleeping Harry Morgan to be absolutely terrifying if you weren’t expecting it.

We retreated to the shadows outside, hiding behind a rack of costumes, holding our breath as the sun began to dip behind the mountains.

We heard the director yell “Cut!” from the other side of the compound. A few minutes later, we saw the familiar silhouette of Harry Morgan walking toward his trailer, looking tired and ready for a nap before the night scenes started.

And that’s when it happened.

He opened the door, and for a heartbeat, there was total silence. Then, a sound erupted from that trailer that I can only describe as a mixture of a teakettle whistling and a man losing his absolute mind.

It wasn’t a scream of terror. It was the sound of a man who had walked into his own room and found himself already in bed.

Harry stumbled back out onto the steps, pointing a trembling finger inside, gasping for air. Alan and I came tumbling out from behind the costume rack, doubled over, barely able to stand.

Harry looked at us, his face turning a shade of purple I didn’t know was biologically possible. He tried to stay mad. He really did. He tried to give us that “Colonel Potter” glare that would usually make a grown man shrink.

But then his lip started to quiver. He looked back at the mannequin in his bed, then back at us, and he just collapsed into a folding chair, howling with laughter.

The problem was, we still had three scenes to film that night.

When we finally got back to the set for a briefing scene in Potter’s office, the atmosphere was thick with residual tension. Every time Harry had to look at me or Alan, his eyes would start to water.

He would get three words into a line—something serious about casualty counts or supply lines—and he’d see the mannequin’s glasses in his mind’s eye.

He’d make this “hmpf” sound, trying to swallow the laugh, but it would just come out as a high-pitched snort.

The director, who was usually a very patient man, started to get twitchy. “Harry, please. We’re losing the light. Just one clean take.”

Harry would nod, straighten his tunic, take a deep breath, and look at the camera with total gravitas. “Now, listen up, people…”

And then Alan would make the slightest, almost invisible movement with his eyebrows. Just a tiny twitch.

Harry would break again. He’d put his head down on his desk, his shoulders shaking, while the rest of us started to catch the bug. It was infectious.

The crew was trying to stay professional, but the camera operator was literally shaking the camera because he was laughing so hard into the viewfinder.

We tried to film that one-minute scene for over two hours. We went through six or seven takes where Harry couldn’t even get past the first sentence.

At one point, Jamie Farr walked in, saw the state we were in, and didn’t even ask what happened. He just started laughing because Harry was laughing.

The director finally threw his clipboard down on the dirt floor and shouted, “That’s it! Everybody out! Go to lunch! I can’t work with a bunch of kindergartners!”

We all shuffled out toward the mess tent, still giggling like idiots. Harry walked between Alan and me, putting his arms around our shoulders.

He leaned in and whispered, “If you ever put a corpse in my bed again, I’ll have you both court-martialed and sent to the front lines with nothing but a butter knife.”

But he was smiling when he said it. That was the magic of that set. We were exhausted, we were working in terrible conditions, and we were under constant pressure to deliver something great.

But we had each other, and we had the ability to make the most serious man in the world lose his dignity over a plastic mannequin in a pair of glasses.

That’s why the show worked. That’s why the chemistry you see on screen feels so real—because it was. We weren’t just actors playing friends; we were a family that delighted in making each other’s lives a little bit more ridiculous.

Whenever I see a rerun of a scene in Potter’s office now, I don’t just see the Colonel. I see the man who spent two hours trying to say the word “ammunition” without thinking about a dummy in his bed.

It’s one of those memories that stays crisp even after forty years. I can still hear his laugh echoing off the hills of the ranch.

Looking back, those moments of pure, unfiltered chaos were the only things that kept us sane during those long seasons.

Do you have a favorite memory of a time you laughed so hard you couldn’t finish what you were doing?