fatal hilarity

The concept of fatal hilarity is not an uncommon one. David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest deals with a video tape containing a movie so entertaining that anyone watching it loses all desire to do anything else, eventually becoming comatose and dying. Paralleling the team of translators in the Monty Python sketch "The Funniest Joke in the World" (who survived their assignment only by translating a single word per person), the only person who could watch the movie was the director, who was too insane to be affected by its humor. In addition, much of comedy slang deals with the concept of death, e.g. "I killed them out there," "I died on stage." The concept was also used in the mixed-live action/animation movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, where excessive laughter was shown to be one of two ways for cartoon characters to die (the other possibility was coming in contact with a concoction known as "dip"). According to the urban legend reference website Snopes.com, there have been at least two documented instances in which people have died apparently of laughter. http://www.snopes.com/horrors/freakish/laughing.asp

Fatal Hilarity

See also