Fictional Deaths Attributed To Laughter
- J. P. Cubish from Daffy Duck's Quackbusters.
- The Toon Patrol in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
- In one of the Give Yourself Goosebumps books by R. L. Stine, it is possible to get an ending where chimpanzees tickle your feet until you die of laughter.
- Kenny McCormick, a character on South Park, suffers said fate in the fifth-season episode "Scott Tenorman Must Die".
- Ana in the play, The Clean House, by Sarah Ruhl.
- Jerry's friend, Fulton, in the Seinfeld episode entitled "The Stand-In".
- In the Batman franchise, famed villain The Joker often kills his victims using a poison that causes uncontrollable and quickly fatal fits of manic laughter - the victim's corpse is often left with a huge ghastly smile reminiscnt of the Joker's own. In the 1989 film, a news broadcast reporting on a scheme involving this very toxin (named "Smilex" in this film) is cut short when one of the reporters begins laughing hysterically, as if amused by the sinister plot, before collapsing dead with the characteristic rictus.
- At the end of the film Mary Poppins, Mr. Dawes, Sr. (Dick Van Dyke) is said to have literally died laughing after being told a joke: "I know a man with a wooden leg named Smith." "Really? What's the name of his other leg?"
- In Episode 12 of Season 1 of 1000 Ways to Die, a man dies after laughing continuously for 36 hours at an unknown joke.
- In Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs where the heroes cross the "Chasm of Death". The chasm is filled with gas fumes (a mixture of helium and laughing gas, causing anyone who breathes in it to laugh uncontrollably while speaking in a high-pitched voice). Although the gas is not the actual cause of death, victims usually cannot stop laughing and thus die while trying to cross the chasm.
- In the Monty Python Sketch The funniest joke in the world, the British win the second world war by translating a lethally funny joke into German and transmitting it via loudspeaker to German troops.
Read more about this topic: Death From Laughter
Famous quotes containing the words fictional, deaths, attributed and/or laughter:
“It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.... This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking.”
—Isaac Asimov (1920–1992)
“This is the 184th Demonstration.
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What we do is not beautiful
hurts no one makes no one desperate
we do not break the panes of safety glass
stretching between people on the street
and the deaths they hire.”
—Marge Piercy (b. 1936)
“The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or color, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever.”
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“There exists a kind of laughter which is worthy to be ranked with the higher lyric emotions and is infinitely different from the twitchings of a mean merrymaker.”
—Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol (1809–1852)