If Oedipus had laughed off the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, instead of completely freaking out about it, he would have never left for Thebes and made the prophecy come true.
The word is easy to laugh off as impossibly eccentric, evoking people who insist that they are being tailed by the secret service or watched over by an alien species.
Someday they would all look back on their journey together and, forgetting or laughing off the painful moments, would regard it as a magical high point in their lives.