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A friend of mine suggested that one of her co-workers laughed in such a fashion, and I was curious if there was a single word or phrase that might closely resemble that.
I asked her if it sounded like a really creaky hiccup, and she said, "It sounds like he's having a little trouble breathing while he's laughing, and that it's punctuated by short hiccup noises."
I'd imagine the onomatopoeia would sound like "hyuk hyuk," but creaky sounding.
There's chortle, a portmanteau word defined as "laugh in a breathy, gleeful way" (Google) and coined by Lewis Carroll (probably as a mixture of "chuckle" and "snort").
