I Told You I Was Ill: Laughing In the Face of Death

HOIST BY HIS OWN PETARD

You’d be surprised at just how many inventors are killed by their own inventions. One of the most famous examples is the unfortunate Austrian tailor Franz Reichelt, whose determination to create a parachute coat in which he could fly had inevitably tragic results.

In February 1912, Reichelt went to Paris to test his contraption from the top of the Eiffel Tower, telling the authorities he would use a dummy. This wasn’t wholly untrue: he donned the coat himself and leapt from a sixty-metre deck to his death.

The grisly moment was even captured on film: forty-five seconds of footage of Reichelt preparing for his ‘flight’ and a four-second plunge. Those with hearty stomachs can view the British Pathé footage online.

Others who have fallen prey to their own creations include:

‘I want to die like my father: peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming and terrified like his passengers.’

BOB MONKHOUSE, COMEDIAN

THE SHOW MUST GO ON

Dying on stage is the ultimate dramatic exit. But to die on stage to peels of laughter when your audience thinks it is part of the act is a unique kind of comedy genius.

In 1673 the renowned French actor and comic playwright Molière died on stage after being seized by a violent coughing fit, much to his spectators’ delight. He was playing the title role in his own play Le Malade Imaginaire (The Hypochondriac) – so you can see why the audience might be confused.

British slapstick comedian Tommy Cooper expired onstage of a heart attack in 1984 while performing at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London and being broadcast live on national television. The audience tittered away as he lay on the floor, convinced the madcap performer was trying out some macabre new material.

In a cruel twist of fate, comedian Eric Morecambe died when he suffered a heart attack during a curtain call of his performance at a theatre in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire. During the performance, he’d said he would hate to die like Tommy Cooper. Oh dear.

Corpulent opera singer Leonard Warren met a similar fate onstage at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1960. Just as he launched into a section which translates as ‘to die, a momentous thing’, he was seized by a coughing fit and fell to the ground, dying of a massive heart attack. Momentous indeed.

A street rather than a stage performance was the last for fifty-three-year-old morris dancer Peter Hardy. During a performance in 2005 in Newmarket, England, Hardy’s heart gave out mid-dance. One wonders whether some people in the audience were secretly relieved that the bizarre traditional dance was brought to an early end.

American comedy actor and stand-up Dick Shawn (1924–87) died onstage during a rather fitting skit. Shawn was poking fun at the campaign cliché of politicians, ‘I will not lay down on the job!’, and to demonstrate laid face down on the floor. Naturally the audience thought that it was all part of the show, until a theatre employee began administering CPR, followed soon after by the paramedics.

Famous Last Words

‘It was the food. It was the food.’

ACTOR RICHARD HARRIS (1930–2002) to diners as he was carried by stretcher through the lobby of London’s swanky Savoy Hotel for his final journey to hospital.

YOU’RE KILLING ME!

If you’ve got to go there are worse ways than to die laughing. Such was the case for fifty-year-old Kings Lynn brickie Alex Mitchell who laughed so hard at a classic episode of British comedy, The Goodies, that he suffered a heart attack. The cheerful epilogue to that story is that Mitchell’s wife Nessie, wrote to the programme makers to thank them for making her husband’s last half hour so happy.

In a similar incident, two centuries before, a Mrs Fitzherbert was thoroughly tickled by the vision of a man dressed as a woman onstage at London’s Drury Lane theatre. So much so that she began to laugh so raucously that she could not desist and had to leave the theatre but was unable to banish the image from her head. Each time she thought of it the laughter would return more hysterically than before – until she reached fever pitch, was overcome with hilarity, and died.

A particularly hilarious pub joke led to the demise of poet and critic Lionel Johnson in 1902 – he fell from his bar stool because of the force of his laughter, fatally cracking his skull on the floor. Just what the joke was, we’ll never know.

In the seventeenth century, the usually dour Scottish aristocrat and polymath Thomas Urquhart died during a fit of laughter brought on by the news that Charles II had retaken the throne of England.

One of the first recorded instances of death by laughter is that of Zeuxis of Heraclea, a Greek artist, who in the fifth century BC died of a burst blood vessel caused by uncontrollably cackling at his own painting of an old woman who had paid him to portray her as Aphrodite, goddess of love.

Another ancient who died by hilarity was Chrysippus of Soli, 280–207 BC, a founder of the Stoic school of philosophy. He cracked up and keeled over after giving his donkey wine and watching the drunken animal attempt to eat figs.

DYING FOR A WEE. LITERALLY

In 2006, twenty-eight-year-old Jennifer Lea Strange from Rancho Cordova, California, met an end worthy of her surname. The young mother of three was found dead in her home hours after trying to win a Nintendo Wii games console on air on the KDND 107.9 radio station. The ill-advised game she was playing? ‘Hold Your Wee for a Wii’, a contest which involved drinking large quantities of water without urinating. Strange died of ‘hyperhydration’, also known as water intoxication.

In Belgium in 2005, an unfortunate woman got caught short on her way home from a bar one night. The twenty-nine-year-old took a shortcut through a cemetery, selected a discreet spot to relieve herself but mid-flow one of the headstones above her toppled and crushed her to death.

Renowned seventeenth-century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe met his inglorious end at a royal banquet when, fearing bad manners, he stayed at the table rather than answer the pressing call of nature