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:
“One of the proud joys of the man of letters—if that man of letters is an artist—is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world’s memory.”
—Edmond De Goncourt (1822–1896)
“Death is too much for men to bear, whereas women, who are practiced in bearing the deaths of men before their own and who are also practiced in bearing life, take death almost in stride. They go to meet death—that is, they attempt suicide—twice as often as men, though men are more “successful” because they use surer weapons, like guns.”
—Roger Rosenblatt (b. 1940)
“... the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God’s will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“The childless experts on child raising also bring tears of laughter to my eyes when they say, “I love children because they’re so honest.” There is not an agent in the CIA or the KGB who knows how to conceal the theft of food, how to fake being asleep, or how to forge a parent’s signature like a child.”
—Bill Cosby (20th century)