This is one of the reasons I think good autobio comics are a LOT harder than people give them credit for!! I think it's really common to have something funny happen and then discover that conveying that to others isn't as simple as repeating the part that made you laugh.
Imo, you have to look at it as if you're scripting a joke, not relating an incident. Sure, you can keep everything accurate, but the process isn't just saying "here's what happened," but setting up and delivering a punchline.
For me, there isn't a one-size-fits-all answer. When I was drawing TNH, I would jot down or take note of things that were entertaining constantly... and then when I sat down to work on a comic, I'd scribble out a rough "script" of dialogue and beats of those situations, to see if I could make a joke out of it that stands on its own as funny. There were a lot of ideas that were funny moments to me, but just too laborious to set up, and they'd get discarded.
But I think a lot of times it's in the set-up -- you can take the exact same moment and make it feel like a funny moment, or like a "you had to be there" inside joke. This comic was just my mom being silly in the moment, and it doesn't seem like it should make much sense, but it's a strip I'm really proud of! Meanwhile this one is just weird, even though at the time, my mom taking nature photography of my recyclables was really funny to me.
When it comes to references -- if it's a reference to something in my life I'll try to see if I can find a way to include that context in the comic, and if I can't make it work it'll usually get dropped. If it's a reference to something outside of the comic..... that depends. Art school quirks usually got explained or exposited, because I wanted to share my life with people who weren't in that environment. Nerd stuff usually didn't get explained -- there's a lot of jokes in TNH that depend on having a basic understanding of D&D, for example. That's just a matter of, this is something I expect my audience to be familiar with, because it's aimed at that crowd.