You know, people always ask me if the camaraderie they saw on screen was real, or if we were all just very talented at faking a decade of friendship.

I was sitting in a small, soundproofed studio last week recording an episode of my podcast, and the guest leaned over and asked me something I didn’t expect.

He didn’t ask about the finale or the awards or the heavy dramatic beats that people usually want to dissect.

He asked me about the “spirit of the prank.”

He wanted to know what happened when the cameras were off, or better yet, when they were on and we were supposed to be behaving.

It immediately took me back to a Tuesday night in 1976.

We were filming in the Stage 9 surgery set, which, if you’ve never been under those lights, was essentially a giant toaster with people inside.

The air was thick with the smell of the Karo syrup we used for blood and the latex of the gloves.

We had been there for fourteen hours.

When you’ve been standing in the same spot for fourteen hours pretending to save lives, your brain starts to do strange things to protect itself.

I looked across the “patient”—who was actually a foam torso with a very realistic chest cavity—at Mike Farrell.

Mike had this look in his eye.

It was the look of a man who had reached the end of his tether and was looking for a way to jump.

Harry Morgan was standing at the head of the table as Colonel Potter, being the absolute professional he always was.

Harry was the rock.

He was the one who kept us on track when the rest of us were acting like schoolboys.

Mike and I had spent the lunch break conferring in my trailer about a specific medical instrument that had been sitting in the prop box.

It wasn’t a hemostat or a scalpel.

We had tucked it deep inside the foam torso during the lighting reset, right where the “liver” was supposed to be.

As the director called for action on a high-stakes, dramatic close-up, I watched Harry’s hand disappear into the surgical opening, his face set in that classic, stern Colonel Potter mask.

And that’s when it happened.

The sript called for Harry to reach into the patient, feel for a fragment of shrapnel, and deliver a grim assessment of the soldier’s chances.

It was one of those “hush falls over the room” moments.

The camera was slowly zooming in on Harry’s face, catching every line of concern, every ounce of that weary authority he brought to the character.

Harry’s hand moved inside the foam chest, his fingers searching for the “wound.”

Suddenly, there was a sound.

It wasn’t the sound of a surgical instrument or a dramatic sigh.

It was a distinct, high-pitched, rubbery squeak.

Harry’s eyes widened, just for a fraction of a second, but he didn’t stop.

He was a pro from the old school.

He pulled his hand out of the incision, but he wasn’t holding shrapnel.

Clutched in his surgical forceps was a bright yellow, six-inch rubber chicken that we had stuffed into the dummy’s “abdomen.”

For about three seconds, the set was deathly silent.

Harry looked at the chicken.

He looked at me.

He looked at Mike.

Then, he looked back at the chicken, and he did something only Harry Morgan could do.

He didn’t break.

He kept his Colonel Potter voice, stone-cold serious, and muttered, “Good God, the boy’s been eating at the mess tent again.”

That was the end of our productivity for the night.

Mike was the first to go.

He let out a sound like a tea kettle whistling and had to double over, gripping the edge of the operating table to keep from falling.

I tried to hold it together—I really did—but seeing that yellow chicken dangling from Harry’s forceps while he tried to maintain military discipline was too much.

I started laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe, and because I was wearing a surgical mask, the mask just kept inflating and deflating like a frantic balloon.

The laughter was like a virus.

It hit the script supervisor first, then the boom operator.

I looked over at the camera crew, and the entire camera was shaking because the operator was buried in his own sleeves, trying to muffle his hysterics.

The director, who had been hoping to wrap for the night, tried to yell “Cut!” but it came out as a strangled wheeze.

We tried to reset.

We really tried.

We spent the next twenty minutes cleaning ourselves up, drying our eyes, and trying to get back into the mindset of a war-torn hospital in 1952.

But every time Harry opened his mouth to start the scene, Mike or I would make a tiny “squeak” sound with our mouths.

And Harry would lose it all over again.

That was the thing about Harry Morgan.

Once you broke that professional seal, he was the biggest kid of all.

He would start this silent, shoulder-shaking laugh that turned his face bright red, and then he’d start making these little “woo-hoo” noises.

We wasted probably an hour of film that night.

The producers probably hated the bill, but it was the best hour of work I’ve ever had.

The crew eventually had to turn the lights off for ten minutes just to let everyone’s adrenaline subside.

We all sat there in the dark of the soundstage, still in our blood-stained scrubs, just giggling like children in a dark bedroom.

It reminded us that we weren’t just making a show about war; we were making a show about the people who survive it by finding something to laugh at, even if that something is a rubber chicken in a surgical cavity.

Years later, I saw Harry at a dinner, and I didn’t even have to say anything.

I just looked at him and made a “squeak” sound.

He nearly fell out of his chair.

That moment became a legend on the Fox lot.

The “Chicken in the Cavity” incident was a reminder that you can take the work seriously without taking yourself seriously.

I think that’s why the show worked.

We were a family, and families are built on the moments where you completely fail to be an adult.

Whenever I see a rubber chicken now, I don’t see a cheap toy.

I see Harry Morgan’s face, the hot lights of Stage 9, and the most professional man I ever knew losing his mind over a piece of yellow plastic.

Looking back, those are the pieces of the show I carry with me the most.

It wasn’t the applause; it was the shared, uncontrollable, breathless joy of a mistake that worked better than the script ever could.

If you were in a high-pressure job for eleven years, what’s the one prank that would have finally broken your composure?