I remember sitting on a stage in a drafty convention hall back in the late seventies, just a few years after the show had gone into heavy syndication.

The room was filled with people who knew our faces better than they knew their own neighbors.

I was leaning back, probably thinking about a cigarette, when a young lad in the front row stood up and held something high above his head.

It was a small, dusty piece of wood and canvas, a section of a prop ladder that looked like it had been salvaged from a scrap heap.

He asked me, quite earnestly, if the tunnel was as difficult to film in as it looked on the television screen.

I felt a sudden, sharp tug of memory, a physical sensation of the smell of sawdust and the taste of stale coffee.

I looked at that piece of wood and I couldn’t help but laugh into the microphone.

I told the audience that they had to understand something about the set of Hogan’s Heroes.

We were working on the old Forty Acres backlot, and while everything looked like a high-security prison camp to the viewers, to us, it was a playground made of plywood and prayer.

The tunnel was the heart of the show, but it was also the bane of our existence.

It wasn’t a real tunnel, of course, but a series of cramped, elevated sets.

One afternoon in 1967, we were filming a scene where the legendary John Banner, our dear Schultz, had to descend into the tunnel for a surprise inspection.

Now, John was a magnificent man, a mountain of a human being with a heart twice the size of his torso.

He was also, as he would be the first to admit, not built for subterranean travel.

The director wanted a shot of him coming down the ladder, looking confused and slightly terrified, while the rest of us scrambled below.

I was standing at the very bottom, right under the hatch, waiting for my cue to look up and act surprised.

The lighting was dim, the air was thick with fake dust, and the crew was hushed, waiting for the magic to happen.

John stepped onto the first rung, his heavy boots echoing against the wood, and he began his slow, methodical descent into the darkness.

Everything was going perfectly, and the silence in the studio was absolute as his massive frame began to fill the opening.

Then, quite suddenly, the laws of physics decided to stage a protest.

John reached the midpoint of the ladder, about four feet above my head, and he simply stopped moving.

There was no dramatic crash, no snapping of wood, just a soft, muffled sound like a cork being hammered into a very expensive bottle of wine.

He didn’t say a word at first.

He just hung there, his midsection wedged firmly against the narrow circular framing of the tunnel entrance.

I looked up, and all I could see was a vast expanse of grey wool uniform and those polished black buttons.

I whispered, “John? Are you alright, mate?”

From somewhere deep within the fabric, a very small, very polite voice drifted down to me.

“Richard,” he said, “I believe I have become a permanent architectural feature of Stalag 13.”

The silence in the studio held for maybe three seconds before the first snort of laughter broke from the back of the room.

It was Bob Crane.

Bob was standing just outside the shot, and once he started, the dam just broke.

Robert Clary and Larry Hovis were behind me, and they were literally doubling over, trying to stay quiet because the cameras were technically still rolling.

The director, Gene Reynolds, was staring at the monitor with his jaw hanging open.

He didn’t yell “Cut.”

He just walked over to the set, looked up at John’s dangling legs, and asked the lead carpenter if we had a permit to install a human barricade in the tunnel.

John, bless his soul, tried to wiggle.

That was the mistake.

Every time he moved, the friction of the wool against the plywood made this rhythmic, squeaking sound that echoed through the hollow set.

It sounded like a family of angry mice was trapped in his belt.

He looked down at me, his eyes wide and twinkling despite the predicament, and he whispered, “I see nothing! Literally, Richard, I can see absolutely nothing but your forehead!”

At that point, the crew gave up.

The grips, the lighting guys, the script supervisors—everyone was howling.

We had to bring in two stagehands with a literal tub of industrial grease and a few crowbars.

They had to greasing the edges of the “dirt” walls around his waist while the rest of us formed a sort of human chain to support his weight from below.

Imagine, if you will, the five of us—the supposed elite sabotage unit of the Allied forces—standing in a circle, arms raised, palms pressed against the backside of a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Austrian actor, trying to shove him back up into the light.

Every time we pushed, we’d slip on the fake snow or the sawdust, and we’d end up in a heap on the floor, laughing so hard we could barely breathe.

It took forty-five minutes to get him out.

When he finally popped free, it made a sound like a giant suction cup being pulled off a window.

He climbed back out onto the “ground” level, straightened his tunic, dusted off his cap, and looked at the director with that perfect, deadpan Schultz expression.

He said, “Perhaps next time, Colonel Hogan can just come to my office? It is much more spacious for a man of my talents.”

We didn’t film another foot of tape that day.

We couldn’t.

Every time any of us looked at a ladder or even looked at John, we would start shaking again.

That was the magic of that cast.

There was no ego, no anger about the wasted time or the ruined shot.

There was just this profound, ridiculous joy in the absurdity of what we were doing.

We were grown men playing soldiers in a backyard made of painted cardboard, and for one afternoon, our biggest enemy wasn’t the German army, but a tight fit and a bit of gravity.

I think about John often, especially when I see a ladder.

He was a man who had seen the worst of the real world, yet he spent his days making sure we never stopped laughing at the imaginary one.

It’s a strange thing, isn’t it, how the moments where everything goes wrong are the ones we end up cherishing the most?

What’s the funniest “unplanned” moment you’ve ever had to navigate in your own work life?