Interviewer: Alan, I’ve heard rumors for years about the legendary giggles on the MAS*H set.

Specifically, I’ve heard that the Operating Room scenes, which were often the most intense and dramatic, were actually the hardest to film because of the cast.

Is it true that you guys were a nightmare for the directors once the sun went down?

Alan: A nightmare? That’s putting it politely.

You have to understand the environment of that OR set.

It wasn’t a real hospital, of course, but it felt like a pressure cooker.

We’d be under those heavy, hot studio lights for twelve or fourteen hours straight.

The air was thick with the smell of the tea we used for “blood” and the latex of the gloves.

By the time two in the morning rolled around, your brain just starts to liquefy.

We were exhausted, we were cramped, and we were all together in a very small space.

But the real “danger” wasn’t the fatigue.

The real danger was Harry Morgan.

Harry joined us in the fourth season as Colonel Potter, and he was the consummate professional.

He had this background in dramatic films and Westerns, so he came in with this incredible discipline.

But underneath that stern, military exterior of Potter, Harry was the most mischievous human being I have ever met.

He had this way of looking at you—this specific, deadpan stare—that could dismantle your entire performance in seconds.

We were filming an episode late in the series, and it was one of those scenes where the tension was supposed to be at a breaking point.

The script was heavy.

Shells were supposed to be exploding nearby, and we were all hunched over a patient.

I was Hawkeye, and I had this long, technical monologue about a vascular repair.

I was focused. I was in the zone.

But I made the mistake of looking up, just for a second, to check the “monitor” or look at my colleague across the table.

Harry was standing right there, his surgical mask tied perfectly, his eyes looking straight into mine.

And that’s when it happened.

Alan: Harry didn’t say a word.

He didn’t move a muscle.

He just did “The Look.”

It was this slight widening of the eyes, combined with a barely perceptible wiggle of his eyebrows above the mask.

To anyone else, it looked like a tired surgeon concentrating.

But to me, who had spent years learning his shorthand, it was like he had just told the funniest joke in the history of the world.

I felt this cold shiver of panic because I knew my next line was coming up, and I could feel the laughter bubbling up from my stomach like lava.

I tried to swallow it. I bit the inside of my cheek so hard I thought I’d draw real blood.

I started the line: “Clamp… we need to… we need to…”

And then I just made this sound.

It wasn’t a laugh. It was a high-pitched “wheeze” that sounded like a dying balloon.

Interviewer: And that was the end of the take?

Alan: Oh, it was the end of the next two hours.

Once I wheezed, Mike Farrell, who was standing next to me as BJ, caught the contagion.

Mike is usually the rock, but once he saw me struggling, he started to shake.

The physical shaking of his shoulders was so violent it was moving the “patient” on the table.

Loretta Swit, who was playing Margaret, tried to be the professional.

She let out this sharp, military “Hmph!” to try and scare us back into character.

But then she looked at Harry.

Harry was still doing it. He was still holding that absurdly vacant, wide-eyed stare.

Loretta just turned around and walked straight off the set.

She didn’t say anything. She just disappeared into the shadows of the soundstage.

The director, I think it might have been Burt Metcalfe that night, yelled “Cut!” but he sounded more annoyed than usual.

He came down from the monitors and said, “Alan, Harry, come on. It’s three a.m. We all want to go home. Just give me the vascular repair line.”

We all took a deep breath. We reset.

The makeup crew came in to pat the sweat—and the tears of laughter—off our faces.

We went for Take 2.

Everything was fine until the exact same moment.

I looked up, and Harry hadn’t changed a thing.

He was like a statue of comedic destruction.

This time, the laughter didn’t just bubble up; it exploded.

I fell forward, putting my forehead against the patient’s chest, just sobbing with laughter.

The extras—the guys playing the orderlies and nurses—started losing it too.

Then, the camera operator started to shake.

If you look at some of the raw dailies from that show, you can actually see the frame jumping because the guy holding the camera is laughing so hard he can’t keep the rig steady.

Interviewer: How did the director handle that? Was he furious?

Alan: That’s the best part.

Burt Metcalfe was trying to be the “dad” of the set.

He was standing there with his arms crossed, looking at his watch, trying to look stern.

But then he made the fatal mistake.

He looked at Harry Morgan and asked, “Harry, what are you doing to them?”

Harry, in that perfect Colonel Potter voice, just said, “I’m just standing here, Burt. I’m a dedicated soldier.”

The way he said “soldier” had this tiny little crack in it.

Burt just lost it.

He didn’t just chuckle. He slumped into his director’s chair and started howling.

He was laughing so hard he couldn’t even call for another take.

The entire crew—the lighting guys in the rafters, the prop masters, the script supervisors—everyone was just paralyzed by this collective hysteria.

It was the kind of laughter that hurts. Your ribs ache, your face muscles are screaming, and you feel like you’re losing your mind.

We had to stop filming for twenty minutes just to let the air clear.

We all had to go outside and stand in the cool night air of the Fox ranch just to remind ourselves that we were grown men and women with a job to do.

But every time I looked at Harry in the moonlight, I’d start up again.

Interviewer: Did you ever get the shot?

Alan: We eventually got it, but only because the director told Harry to look at the floor.

He literally forbade Harry from making eye contact with me during my close-up.

If you watch that episode, you’ll see Potter is very focused on his own work during my speech.

That wasn’t a character choice. That was a legal requirement to keep the production from going bankrupt.

That was the magic of that cast, though.

We were dealing with such heavy themes of life and death every day.

If we hadn’t had those moments where we absolutely fell apart over a look from Harry Morgan, I don’t think we could have done eleven years.

The laughter was the safety valve. It kept us sane.

Even now, years after Harry is gone, I can see that face in my head and I’ll start smiling in the middle of a grocery store.

It was a beautiful, chaotic kind of love we all had for each other.

And Harry was the king of it.

He was the only man who could stop a multimillion-dollar production just by moving his eyebrows a quarter of an inch.

Do you have a group of friends who can make you lose your mind without saying a single word?