Laurel and Hardy
I don't know why it is, but your average bystander seems to find something irresistibly comical in the spectacle of a dog being chased by a person in uniform. The dog may think it's a game, too, which may be what makes the whole thing look so funny to so many folks, but the dog doesn't understand that if it disappears it may never get back home, and if it runs in the street it will most likely get hit by a car. Your evil neighborhood dogcatcher understands the stakes though. And so does the dog's frantic owner, desperate to get his beloved dog back safe and sound. So why do passersby stand there and laugh? What's so doggone funny? Maybe it's just a conspiracy by all our good angels to keep us humble, to remind us that we're just dogcatchers, and even when after an hour and a half chase through traffic by two evil dogcatchers and a frantic owner, informing each other of the dog's successive disappearances and miraculous reappearances by radio and cell phone, the dog is at last safely caught and returned to the sobbing, grateful owner, the good folks in police communications later inform the comical dogcatcher that she and her partner had them all in stitches over there in the communications room, listening to the amusing chase as it came over the radio for such a ridiculously extended length of time. "We were laughing our butts off at you guys" the clown-like dogcatcher is told humorously. "You two sounded like Laurel and Hardy."

I tell ya, we don't get no respect.